Rubble Reading

One-for-one land destruction lives or dies by whether the opponent has a land worth removing, and the classic three-mana version (Stone Rain and its many cousins) hits an empty target more often than not. Paying a mana over that baseline buys the answer to that problem: scry 2 is the consolation clause that keeps the spell from rotting in hand when there is no ramp land, no manland, no color-critical dual to blow up. That is the design tension in strip-a-land effects generally. They are feast or famine, backbreaking against a color-screwed board and useless against a settled one, so the card-selection rider is insurance against the famine end rather than a bolted-on bonus. It lets a slower shell fold spot land removal into its normal draw-smoothing economy: worst case, you paid an extra mana for a filtered draw step. What the rider does not do is change the class of card this is. There is no way to two-for-one, no repeatable denial, no punish for greedy ramp beyond taking one piece of it away. It is a single clean answer to a single problematic land, priced above the historical rate because the scry means it is never fully dead.