Is Lorthos an overpowered Masslanddestruction card ?

 … And why didn’t you ban it ?! < that was a question that we received. (And some more regarding other, similar cards or effects).

 

So it is quite simple: „Destroy“ from destruction is cearly defined an evergreen Keyword in MtG, meaning that a permanent is moved from the battlefield to the graveyard. We do also go hand in hand with you if you would say „exile“ is similar, going from battlefield to exile.

When a land or creature gets tapped, you don’t consider it  being destroyed. You can even respond to lands getting tapped and cast instants or activate abilities. When you are affected by an effect which prevents you from untapping lands, you could have played artifact or creature based mana. So yes, we encourage you to play manaelves or manastones ! And we do think that while masscreature or artifactremoval is also not considered massland(mana)destruction, we think that massramp, which was always stronger and unevitable, can also get a little counterpart.
 

We also don’t ban cards which have the power of being combinated with other cards to „exploit“ the massdiscard, masslanddestruction rules; there are too many of these, and we want to let you play and get the ban list as short as possible.

So, yes, you can give a Numot, the Devestator double strike.

Also, to be clear, we want to avoid massdiscard or masslanddestruction as far as possible, but we don’t rule it that it is totally forbidden ! There are still cards allowed which do destroy 3+ lands, and we are fine with that. We just don’t want to see this happen every game, it should be a rare occurence and still be part / counterpart of the game which can happen and be possible.