Pointed Discussion

Evil card. This card and others like it such as flashfire or acid rain should never have been made. They aren't good enough for tournaments but when successful they break the game to casual players with known decks. If a friend has a mono white deck it doesn't matter how good it is if they lose all their lands. The great thing about Magic: The Gathering is the almost unlimited possibilities and creativity available. This card limits that. There is a reason you do not see these effects anymore.

Mr.jsttu has no clue what he's talking about. If your friend's can come up with a strategy to ruin your deck, than it's guarenteed you can come up with a strategy to counter them. Those poor blue mages and their Counterspell's. Or, if they keep burning all your plains up, destroy all of their stuff back. Remember: Magic is a game of revenge.

@Drewsel: Actually, jsttu knows exactly what he's talking about. Most casual players don't like to go back to the drawing board with their deck because their friend created a deck specifically to beat theirs. Yes, you can go ahead and make Magic a game of revenge where Player A builds a deck to beat Player B's, so Player B builds their Deck #2 to beat Player A, and then Player A has to build another deck to beat that one... Most people find that the game gets degenerate at that point. I am in this camp; I want to build my deck and be done. I will make some minor changes when I see it has some glaring holes, but I don't want to have to completely revamp it because you built a Silver Bullet deck just to best me. Arms Races do not make for good Magic.

I understand this card. Color hate is part of the color pie. There are just ways of doing it without destroying all of someone's lands. That's no fun. Most of the modern day uses punishes playing a monocolor deck; cards like Tsunami can seriously hurt even a multicolored deck by wiping out part of their mana base.

Mana Leaked.

Green crush blue! Green KILL Blue!
@Everyone
Or, you know, you could build... a second deck. Then a third! Don't tell people what you're using before you play, and you'll never fall victim to the "hate deck." Even better, you force your friends to actually build good decks to beat you, rather than repeatedly kick you in the weak area between your legs that you boldly and carelessly leave unprotected.
Wrath of God is undercosted removal against aggro decks. Its unfairly strong against a deck that plays lots of creatures and nothing else. What do you do to stop it? Few things will actually work. Counterspells and niche spells like Ghostway and Second Sunrise come to mind. Beating your opponent before he has 4 mana works just as well. Duress? Works to an extent, yes. Winter Orb works too.
You beat Tsunami in your monoblue deck in much the same way, albeit with different tools. You can still lose to Tsunami, and Flashfires, and Wrath of God, but that's Magic. Once you've finished your deck, you're at the mercy of your draw step.

Where would one find Magic to be a game of revenge?!

I use it in a blue/ green deck that turns all my opponent's lands into islands first... Spreading Seas, Aquitect's Will, Carpet of Flowers, Choke, Quicksilver Fountain, Living Tsunami, et cetera.

Turn all my opponents lands into islands, destroy them, win.

If it work's it's no fun at all. If it doesn't work then it's also no fun at all.

DESTROY TARGET J-A-P-A-N

Stormtide Leviathan

That poor village of Phalluses doesn't stand a chance!

Yes, mass land destruction can be evil. But if that's all it takes for your friends to be gutting your deck, maybe you need to be reconsidering things.

Maybe you're being hated against so much because your deck isn't fair. It might be that they're resorting to this card just to try and keep up with you. Are you using some insane combo that's way above the power level of your friends' decks? Or did your friend just start playing Magic, while you insist on using your best cards against their fledgling collection of a few dozen commons and uncommons (as it was when I first started and one of my friends insisted on using his playset of Strip Mines and Jace, the Mind Sculptors). Either consider toning down your deck, or help your group up their game so that you're all on a similar level.

Or perhaps, as Kryptnyt says, you've become too predictable to your playgroup so they know exactly what hate to run against you. Why not try branching out more - make a variety of different decks of different styles so your friends won't know what you're coming up with next. You'll end up being a better Magic player because of it.

And if you're really so attached to your "baby" deck, there are TONS of sideboardable cards you can use to deal with an effect like this. Splash white for Terra Eternal or Meddling Mage. Or spend a whole one mana for an Envelop (or four for a Quash to take out their playset). Or use a Magical Hack or Whim of Volrath to give them a taste of their own medicine. You should be able to fit something in without compromising what made your deck work.

So no, mass land destruction isn't the most elegant or fair types of color hate. But IMO it's not the sort of spell that should lead to an arms race of revenge-focused games that end up being grueling and unenjoyable. If that is what's happening I would suspect it's more the fault of the people involved than the card itself.

Why does this exist

I actually love this card. Playing casual with ridiculous hate cards throws the game completely up in the air and gives Timmies and noobs alike the chance to beat up on experienced players.

When I first got into Magic I never really thought of blue and green as enemy colors and probably would never have unless the manual told it to me. They simply didn't interact with each other on a level that blue and red or green and black did. Of course, it didn't help that for the longest time most of what green could do to hose blue, blue could simply counter.

And sometimes even when green does get a good card to hose blue, such as Thrun, the Last Troll, a card like Phantasmal Image gets released almost immediately afterward to make him look foolish.

But as far as this card goes, it's not bad, and if it ever resolves can really hurt blue, but Choke is probably a better option these days.

1. I hate cards like this. It makes the game into little more than glorified rock-paper-scissors.
2. For those wondering about the flavor (more so on other printings but I like to keep it on the front page, where people check when looking at cards) it actually does make sense. Remember, despite what wizards may have us believe, an island is a small piece of land in a body of water. If that water were to smother the land that island would be gone, replaced with ocean/sea/lake ect. What is it that makes waves? Well, that is wind so it sort of makes sense (though in Tsunamis earthquates do the wave-making. Ok, earth is red. You have me there).

Have you younger people heard of the phrase "don't put all your eggs in one basket?" Do you understand what that means? Most of you newer players seem to have no idea why color-hosers were created in the first place. It was to provide checks and balances against the power of mono-colored decks. Single-color decks have it so easy with generating mana and never being shorted on any particular colors, and tend to be aggressively strong with narrow strategies - while bearing glaring weaknesses in other aspects. This kind of dynamic threatens game balance. Cards like Tsunami were there to keep things from getting out of hand... and they are a teaching tool as well.

You see, cards which are designed to punish a specific strategy teach you a valuable lesson: putting all of your eggs in one basket leaves you highly vulnerable to particular events that may happen. This is an important piece of wisdom that applies to our lives way beyond a card game.