Crescendo of War
A buff that grows worse for everyone the longer it sits, which is exactly the point: a strife counter lands every upkeep regardless of who is swinging, so the offensive bonus is shared by every attacker at the table. But the two halves of the card do not match, and the mismatch is the whole strategic axis. The attack bonus applies to anyone's attacking creatures; the blocking bonus applies only to creatures you control. The result is a clock with no owner on offense and a private wall on defense. The design tension it resolves is the multiplayer arms race: a Pacifism-style effect slows one player down, but this instead makes combat universally more lethal until somebody is forced to swing, and whoever swings is swinging into your buffed blockers while everyone else's defense stays flat. Leave it ticking long enough and any attack into you becomes suicidal, while you keep the option to alpha-strike once the counter total has stacked high enough to matter. That turns it into a patience engine: a deck built to absorb early aggression, deter combat outright, and convert a fat strife total into one decisive turn or a slower win condition assembling behind the wall. The card asks the table to play chicken with a number that only goes up, hands the defensive half of that number to one seat, and rewards whoever blinks last.
