Volcanic Eruption
A blue card that punishes red. The design hook is the inversion: blue, the color historically barred from direct damage and land destruction, gets both at once, gated behind a triple-blue commitment and aimed exclusively at Mountains. The does double duty, setting both how many Mountains you destroy and the damage every creature and every player takes, but its ceiling is hard-capped: you can only point it at the Mountains actually on the battlefield, so a stingy opposing manabase shrinks the effect no matter how much you pour into it. That symmetry is the friction the design leans on: you cannot fire it without a board you are willing to wipe alongside your opponent's. It reads as a hate card, but the structure is closer to a wrath with a kicker, priced in a color that does not normally get to cast wraths. The early-Magic design language is all over it (open-ended X, asymmetric color hate, a sorcery that punishes a specific basic by name), and it belongs to the lineage of color-pie boundary-pushers the game has steadily walked back from in the decades since. Modern blue gets bounce, taxes, and the occasional Cyclonic Rift; it does not get to Stone Rain a Mountain and Earthquake the table off the same card.

Rules text
Format Status
More formatsFewer formats
Other printings
- 30th Anniversary Edition#88
- 30th Anniversary Edition#385
- Fourth Edition Foreign Black Border#112
- Summer Magic / Edgar#89
- Foreign Black Border#89
- Revised Edition#89
- Intl. Collectors' Edition#89
- Collectors' Edition#89










