Seeds of Innocence
A symmetrical artifact sweeper that pays its victims, which tells you most of what you need to know about how green answered artifice in this era. Green is the color-pie's natural-order enemy of the artificial, the primary home for both targeted artifact destruction and mass sweepers, but this design adds a peculiar tax that most green answers do not: the life clause. You cannot pick what dies, and every controller gains life equal to what they lost. That payout is the spell's most distinctive friction. It turns the wipe into a reset rather than a tempo play, since the opponent walks away from a cleared board with a fatter life total than before. The "can't be regenerated" rider is the historically literal touch, an answer to a regeneration-heavy period when artifact creatures could shrug off destruction; it dates the card more precisely than any set symbol. As a piece of green's anti-artifact toolkit it belongs to the broad tradition of category sweepers that destroy a permanent type wholesale rather than answering a single target, the philosophical opposite of a clean removal spell. This is a card built for a board state, not a target: it wants a table littered with artifacts and is dead weight against an opponent who has none. The life refund is the cost of swinging that wide, the designers' way of charging green for the privilege of an indiscriminate, regeneration-proof reset.
