Dueling Grounds

Combat math is the resource this enchantment attacks. By capping every combat at a single attacker and a single blocker, it strips away the entire premise of the wide board: the player who built up a swarm of tokens or small creatures finds that swarm reduced to one swing per turn, while a defending player who is behind on bodies suddenly needs only one good blocker to hold. It reads as symmetrical and plays anything but, because the constraint punishes whoever was banking on numerical superiority and rewards whoever owns the single best creature. That makes it a control piece wearing stax clothing: a way for the deck with one large, evasive, or hard-to-kill threat to neutralize the deck with twenty 1/1s. The Selesnya color pair sharpens the irony, since green-white is the guild most associated with going wide, yet here it hands that same archetype a tool for shutting itself down from the other side of the table. The lock's blind spot is the interesting part: it touches nothing outside the combat step, so pingers, direct damage, and alternate win conditions sail past it untouched, and the player who least needs to attack benefits most from making attacking irrelevant. A defensive enchantment that forces the board to fight one creature at a time, and quietly decides who wins the instant the two boards stop being equal.