Cosmic Horror

The upkeep tax is the whole design: a 7/7 first striker for six mana would have been an unthinkable rate in 1994, so the card pays for itself with a recurring cost equal to its casting cost, and a 7-damage punishment if you ever flinch. The math is brutal and self-correcting. Cast it on turn six, and you owe another on turn seven just to keep it; miss the payment and the creature euthanizes you on the way out, often closing the game in the opponent's favor rather than yours. This is the Legends-era design idiom of upkeep-cost giants (the same family that produced Lord of the Pit and the various demons that demanded creature sacrifices), where the body is priced at a future rate the player is expected to fail to meet. Cosmic Horror strips the pattern to its starkest form: no tribute, no sacrifice fodder, just a flat mana bill the size of the original cast, repeated until you lose. The 7-damage clause is the elegant cruelty. It is not flavor text. It is the designer ensuring that the escape hatch (letting the creature die to clear the upkeep) is itself a loss condition for any deck that cast it from a low life total. A card built to punish the player who reached for it, in an era when reaching for a 7/7 first striker felt like it had to come with strings attached.