Ancient Runes

A symmetrical hate enchantment built for a specific era of anti-artifact design. The damage scales with each player's own artifact count and triggers on that player's upkeep, which means it taxes whoever leaned hardest into artifacts and leaves a non-artifact deck untouched. That structure points at a period when Wizards built sideboard cards aimed at the artifact-heavy decks of the day rather than at single permanents: this is the broad-stroke punisher that scales with an opponent's commitment instead of removing one piece. The symmetry is the discipline that prices it: the controller pays the same tax, so it rewards a deck that has chosen to stay light on artifacts while the opponent has not. Because it deals damage on the upkeep trigger rather than on cast or on entry, it punishes the board already assembled, which makes it a poor answer to a single threat and a real clock against a deck that has flooded the table. It belongs to the family of counting hosers, the ones that ask "how many?" rather than "which one?", with the damage rising one point per artifact in a clean linear scale. The design is a snapshot of how artifact hate was tuned before targeted removal and mass artifact destruction became the default tools.