Sandstone Deadfall

Two lands and the artifact itself, all spent to kill one attacker: that price tag is the whole story, and it tells you exactly what kind of removal this is. Most attacker-only answers ask for a card or a few mana; this one asks for a wholesale liquidation, three permanents gone to stop a single swing. The design logic is land sacrifice as a rate ceiling, born from a graveyard-matters era when feeding lands to the bin was supposed to be an upside elsewhere. Here the cost is so steep that the destroy effect reads almost as compensation for the resource hit rather than the point of paying it. The tap and the once-only nature (the artifact sacrifices itself) mean you get exactly one reactive answer, and you pay for it by stranding your mana base two lands short going forward. The card answers a problem, a single oversized attacker, by manufacturing a worse one, a crippled board state, and it offers no flexibility on timing beyond the combat step it was built to interrupt. It belongs to a brief design moment when defensive artifacts could be priced at land economy, a fifth and sixth land treated as currency you could burn. Later answers to attackers came cheaper and cleaner, which is why this particular flavor of resource-sacrifice removal never really came back.