Soulscour

Ten mana to wipe the board clean except artifacts is not a price you pay by accident: it is the cost of an effect calibrated for an era when one side of the table was made of metal. Wrath of God reset creatures for four; Akroma's Vengeance widened the blast to artifacts and enchantments for six; this pushes the destruction all the way to nonartifact permanents (lands, enchantments, planeswalkers, every creature that isn't an artifact) at a cost that only ever made sense when your own deck was the artifact deck and your opponent's was not. The card's whole reason for existing is the asymmetry it grants in that matchup. It was less a mass-removal spell than a reset button tuned to leave your own steel standing while everything organic across the table vanished. Strip away that context and the effect reads as comically overcosted, and outside an artifact-heavy shell it is. But that is exactly the design lever: the higher the artifact density in your own list, the more lopsided the sweep becomes. It is mass removal that rewards committing to a single material, a sorcery that punishes the player who built with flesh and blood against the player who built with metal.