Chill

Two extra mana per spell does not stop a red deck; it just makes that deck run a turn behind, paying a tempo tithe on every Bolt-style trade until the race is already lost. That is the logic of the permanent-based hoser at its purest: install it once and it keeps working unattended, quietly converting red's signature strength (cheap, redundant spells) into a liability, because the more copies of a thing you want to cast, the more often you pay the surcharge. The text is technically symmetrical: a red mage who slams it down eats the tax too. But symmetry is rarely the operative fact, because the player installing it has built around the constraint and the target almost certainly has not. The friction also lands hardest where red is strongest, since a flat surcharge hurts most as a percentage of a one-mana spell's cost; the cheaper the curve, the more punishing the toll. Two extra mana is not a hard lock, it is a drag coefficient, and the only off switch is removing the enchantment outright. That install-and-forget pressure defined a whole style of sideboard tool before design drifted toward narrower, cleaner taxes that hit one spell type or asked for a one-time payment. Here the payment never ends, which is what separates a tax from a wall.