Enchanter's Bane
Punisher cards hand the opponent a choice between two bad outcomes, and this one aims that structure squarely at enchantments. The tension it exploits is that the higher an enchantment's mana value, the harder both prongs bite: sacrifice it and lose the investment, or keep it and eat damage scaling with the very cost that made it worth casting. A cheap aura shrugs the damage off, but the big enchantment engines and expensive planar-scale permanents that punisher red actually wants dealt with hurt most to keep. That scaling is the whole design idea, and it addresses red's oldest structural gap: the color can target an enchantment freely but cannot destroy one, so its answer here is not removal but taxation, converting a permanent it can point at but never break into a recurring end-step decision. The timing reinforces that. Because the trigger sits on your own end step and picks a fresh target each turn, it functions less like removal and more like a standing threat, aiming at whatever enchantment is most painful that turn and letting the controller decide whether to pay. The catch is that the choice belongs to them, not you: a player willing to sacrifice a spent enchantment gets off cheaply, and one whose enchantment did its work as a one-shot may happily let it die. It is a slow, opponent-directed pressure valve, the compromise red accepts for a leash on a permanent type it was never built to answer cleanly.


