Creature Bond

Burn routed through blue, which tells you how loosely the original design space treated color identity. The payoff is direct damage keyed to a creature's toughness, an effect that reads more like a black death-trigger or a red finisher than anything blue would print today. The structural logic is a punishment Aura: enchant a creature you do not control, and the opponent is taxed for killing their own threat, with the bigger the body, the heavier the bill. That made it a soft pacification effect (the opponent does not want to trade a fattie into a removal spell when doing so means eating a fistful of damage) wrapped around a cheap enchantment slot. The design has not aged well, because the era's removal suite has: either player can decide when, or whether, the creature dies, and bounce and exile both sidestep the trigger by never sending the creature to the graveyard. Sacrifice does not save them; sacrificing a creature is dying, so a sac outlet fires the Aura rather than dodging it, which is the kind of edge case the punishment-Aura framework quietly depends on. What it documents is the window before blue's color pie hardened, when blue could deal damage as a consequence of an opponent's action so long as the damage was routed through an Aura and a death trigger. The mechanic survives in spirit in punishing Auras printed since, but blue stopped writing burn into its enchantments long ago.