Smallpox

Four resources stripped from both players at once, for two mana: a card, a creature, a land, and a point of life. The symmetry is the joke and the trap. The card looks fair because both players pay, but the player who casts it has already arranged to come out ahead. The classic build runs few lands and few creatures, often leaning on recursive threats and graveyard payoffs, so the costs that gut an opponent's resources barely scratch the caster. Forcing a land sacrifice on turn two is the part that does the real violence: in a format where a missed land drop can lose the game, taxing the mana base of both players asymmetrically punishes the deck that needs its lands more. The discard and creature sacrifice are insurance against the early plays that would otherwise punish a player for going low to the ground. It is a denial spell disguised as a symmetrical Armageddon-lite, sitting in the same design tradition as the pure mass land destruction of an earlier era but priced and scoped so a focused deck can absorb its own half of the bill. The whole engine depends on building a deck that cares about almost nothing this spell can take.