Barrensteppe Siege

The wedge-clan siege template asks a single question as it enters and never asks again, and the two answers here pull toward opposite decks. Choose Abzan and the enchantment becomes a grindy anthem engine: every end step piles a counter onto each creature you control, rewarding a wide board and converting a stalled ground into an inevitability machine. Choose Mardu and it stops caring about your board size at all, policing your opponents' creatures one at a time, but only on turns a creature has already died under your control. That conditional is the load-bearing restriction: the Mardu mode is not a free edict, it is a payoff for a shell that was already going to lose creatures, so the sacrifice trigger folds cleanly into a deck built to feed it. The tension is that the two halves want different bodies. Abzan wants creatures to keep alive and stack counters onto; Mardu wants creatures to throw away. Because both triggers fire on your end step, each mode comes online the turn the enchantment resolves: Abzan pumps immediately, Mardu strips a creature if you have spent one already. Locking the mode as it enters means the card reads its owner's whole game plan into a single permanent choice, and it plays differently across a match: the anthem grind in one game, the attrition vise in another. What unifies both is that each rewards a player who decided which long game they intended to win before the card ever hit the table.