Land destruction

Land destruction can refer to either a card that destroys lands or a deck with the main goal of destroying its opponent's lands.

Description

Land destruction is primarily centered in red, with green and black getting tertiary.^[1]^[2] White used to have Armageddon as a mass land destruction spell, but this ability has been moved to red in a rearrangement of the Color pie.

Land destruction can be a viable strategy and has supported, in its cheapest forms, many aggressive decks of the Sligh or Suicide Black variety. These decks would play cheap creatures in the early turns, followed by land destruction effects such as Pillage, Sinkhole, Strip Mine, and Wasteland to keep the opponent from generating enough mana to play answers to the early creatures. Rishadan Port was also commonly employed in its capacity to deny mana to the opponent, though it doesn't outright destroy the land.

However, R&D perceives land destruction as bad for the game as it promotes non-interactive gameplay and prevents the player on the other end from even participating in the game, due to the inability to produce enough mana to cast their spells. Thus, the cost of destroying lands has increased. Whereas Stone Rain was the common land destruction effect at three mana present in every Core Set up to 9th Edition, it has since been replaced by effects such as Demolish or Tectonic Rift in the four mana range.

R&D no longer wants to support land destruction effects that can be played in large quantities and render a player incapable of playing the game,^[3] but still wants to provide cards that enable players to destroy certain lands that can be threatening otherwise. A prime example of this doctrine is Tectonic Edge, which was included in Worldwake to be a tournament viable answer to the Manlands in the same set. Anti-nonbasic designs persist past this, in no small part due to the Urzatron engine being able to dominate the game with three lands. The general policy has changed to land destruction effects being able to punish decks without many basic lands, such as Field of Ruin and Boseiju, Who Endures.

Red is the one color that still regularly does land destruction. Black and green can do it but do it very infrequently. Most land destruction in green these days is "destroy target noncreature permanent".^[2]

In 2016-2017, R&D experimented with land freezing (forcing a land to not untap), but it didn't stick either.^[4]