Reign of Terror
A color-hosed sweeper with a self-inflicted cost, and that cost is what makes the card worth talking about. Mass removal aimed at a single color was cheap and brutal in the early sets, so the friction here is not the mana but the life: two points for every green or white creature you erase, paid by you, with no regeneration to soften either side. That clause inverts the usual reasoning behind a one-sided wrath. The more value you extract, the deeper you dig your own life total, which turns a board-clearing sorcery into a calculation rather than a reflex. Against a wide green or white field it can cost as much life as a serious attack would have dealt, so it punishes the very situation it is built to answer. The modal choice between green and white reads as flexibility, but in practice it commits you to scanning the board for which color you can afford to destroy, not just which color is threatening you. It is a product of an era when designers leaned on color-specific hate as a balancing lever and bolted on a cost to keep the effect from being free. The result is a removal spell that asks you to spend your own resource to use it, a piece of the period's experiment in making the answer hurt the person holding it.
