Cruel Reality

Seven mana buys a recurring dilemma, handed to a player and repeated every upkeep: give up a creature or planeswalker, or shed five life when they can't. The design lineage is the recurring-tax curse, a black tradition that runs through Painful Quandary, but where Quandary punished spell-casting, this one taxes the board. The recursion is what separates it from a one-shot Edict: a single resolution becomes a clock that strips a creature or planeswalker every turn the player can pay one, and converts to a five-life beating the moment they have neither. That dual outcome is the elegant part of the construction. An opponent flooded with creatures loses them one at a time; an opponent who has emptied their board to race you starts bleeding life instead, so the curse adapts to the situation it finds rather than demanding a specific game state to matter. The price it pays for that flexibility is the seven-mana cost and the upkeep delay: nothing happens the turn it resolves, and even afterward the choosing belongs to the enchanted player, who picks which creature or planeswalker to lose. It is a curse built for multiplayer attrition and grindy long games, where five life a turn or a steadily emptying battlefield is the kind of pressure a single card has no business applying turn after turn.