Shatter

The Alpha-vintage benchmark for a problem the game has never stopped having. Artifacts sit outside the color pie's usual restrictions, which means every color needs a way to deal with them, and red's solution from the start was the cheapest and bluntest available: two mana, instant speed, no conditions, gone. The rate became the standard every red artifact-hate card has answered to ever since. Smash to Smithereens bolts a face for the privilege; Abrade folds the same destruction into a flexible split; Smelt shaves a mana at sorcery speed; Vandalblast goes one mana and scales into a sweeper; By Force trades efficiency for width. Each either undercuts the cost, attaches a rider, or stretches the target line. The template is so clean that its afterlife is mostly its own siblings in other colors: Naturalize ported it to green and folded in enchantments, Disenchant did the same in white at an identical rate. What Shatter established is the principle that artifact removal is a tax color identity pays in exchange for getting to play with artifacts at all, and that the tax should be cheap enough to maindeck without apology when the metagame calls for it. Riders have outclassed the bare effect for decades, but the slot it defined (two mana, instant, unconditional, red) is still where every conversation about red artifact hate begins.