Descent into Madness

A symmetrical doomsday clock that punishes its own controller as harshly as everyone else, and that is the design point, not a flaw. The trigger fires once per cycle, on the controller's upkeep, and when it resolves every player exiles simultaneously: you add a despair counter, then the whole table sheds permanents and hand cards at the same escalating rate. By the third upkeep of its existence everyone is paying three apiece, then four, then five, until the board strips down to almost nothing. The leverage comes from who can stay ahead of the math, and the wrinkle is that each player chooses what they exile from their own permanents and hand. An aggressor who has already dumped everything onto the board can feed the tax with spent tokens while still threatening lethal; the player a full grip protects is whoever can pay the counter out of hand instead of cutting into a developed permanent base. So the deck most exposed is the slow, permanent-heavy build sitting on a tight set of engine pieces and an empty hand: nothing cheap to throw away, so the tax bites into the things that matter. It is black doing the table-clearing work white usually reserves for one-shot wipes, but on an escalating timer instead of a reset, and because it exiles rather than destroys, it sidesteps recursion entirely. The slow build is the price: you have to survive enough of your own upkeeps for the counter math to tilt before the spiral works for you rather than against you.