Thoughts of Ruin

The size of the wipe and the price you pay are the same number: every card in your hand both scales the destruction and counts you among the players sacrificing lands. A fistful of cards craters everyone's manabase, an empty hand does nothing, and the configurations that maximize the damage are precisely the ones that bleed you the most. That self-inflicting symmetry is the puzzle the spell asks you to solve. The destruction touches only lands, never threats, and it touches yours too, so a careless cast leaves you the one excavating your own mana out of the rubble. The home is a deck that can stockpile cards without leaning on the lands it is about to detonate: a board already deployed before this resolves, mana rocks or recursion that outlive the sacrifice, and a hand fat enough to strip an opponent's manabase while you absorb the fallout. The break has to be engineered rather than printed. Where other land destruction hands the caster a built-in asymmetry, this one withholds it and demands you manufacture the edge yourself through board state, timing, and what survives in play. The reward for getting the alignment right is a one-sided land wipe scaled to your own draw; the penalty for casting it on instinct is mutual assured collapse.