Arenson's Aura
Enchantment removal once lived inside the enchantment slot itself, and the friction shows in every line. The first ability asks you to feed it: it eats one enchantment to destroy another, which makes it a one-for-one only if you build a board of expendable permanents to sacrifice into it, and a card-disadvantage trap if you do not. That cannibalizing cost is the design tax of the period, when Wizards priced repeatable disenchant effects behind a per-use sacrifice rather than letting white police enchantments cleanly. The second ability is stranger still: a hard counter for enchantment spells gated behind a heavy blue activation cost, bolted onto a white permanent. Splashing blue to staple a situational counterspell onto an already-narrow enchantment-control piece is the kind of multicolor activation cost that early design reached for before it understood how much mana a board state actually has to spare. Look at how narrowly the game once defined answers: this touches enchantments and nothing else, not creatures, not artifacts, and every line demands resources the deck can rarely afford to commit. The hate-card-as-permanent idea would mature into cleaner expressions later; this is the rough first draft, a snapshot of how thoroughly the design language around enchantment interaction has tightened since.


