Stench of Evil

Color-hosing land destruction aimed squarely at white, a relic of an era when pointed answers to specific basic land types were considered fair rather than a faux pas. Where later sets soften nonbasic removal or fold it into flexible "destroy target land" effects, this one names a single basic type and erases every copy in play at once. The cleverness lives in the secondary clause. Rather than simply dealing damage for each Plains destroyed, it hands each Plains controller a tax: pay per land or take a point. That converts a one-sided beating into a resource decision, draining mana from a player already watching their manabase collapse and forcing a choice between life and tempo. The cost is a double-pip commitment, a signal it was always meant for a dedicated black shell willing to warp around punishing white. It belongs to a small family of land-destruction-as-archetype designs, the same impulse that produced effects aimed at other basic types. What dates it is also what makes it a clean artifact of its moment: a card that justifies itself only when someone across the table is leaning on Plains, and whose ceiling is therefore set by the metagame it lands in rather than any intrinsic rate.