Dread of Night

A color-hosed hatebox priced at one black mana, with a static -1/-1 stapled to white creatures the way Light of Day or Karma punished black from the other direction. This is an early-era answer to a specific threat shape: the small, repeatable white bodies that win by going wide. A single point of toughness reduction sounds trivial, but it is a global, permanent shrink that does not target, does not wait for the stack, and kills any white one-toughness creature on sight, including ones not yet on the battlefield. That is the logic of the era's enchantment-based hosers: cheap, sweeping, and asymmetrical, trading flexibility for a rate that lets the answer come down early and stay down. The cost of that asymmetry is the same one every color-hoser pays: it does nothing against the rest of the table, so it lives and dies by how much white sits across from you. Where the metagame leaned on weenie white, a one-mana permanent that quietly erases a third of an opponent's curve is a brutal opening; everywhere else it sits inert in hand. The design speaks to a period when sideboard-grade hate was gated behind color identity rather than mechanical conditions, back when "white creatures get -1/-1" was considered a fair trade for the cheapest spell in the game.