Energy Flux

A tax, not a wall: every artifact on every battlefield grows an upkeep cost of two generic mana or it dies, and the whole design lives in that gap. The artifact player is not locked out; they are bled. No exemption for the controller, no scaling, no escape through color or cost. The symmetry is the trick, and the asymmetry lives entirely in the deckbuilding: a deck running two or three utility artifacts can usually afford the rent or simply cut them, while a strategy that floods the board with mana rocks and artifact creatures has to pay the toll across every permanent it owns at once. It was printed into a format where artifacts had just demonstrated they could break the game, and the design lineage runs straight from here through Null Rod, Stony Silence, Collector Ouphe, and Karn, the Great Creator: each a tighter, more targeted iteration of the same thesis. What separates this one is the upkeep-tax framing rather than a flat shutdown. The card does not turn the opponent's artifacts off; it puts a clock on them, demanding a tribute every turn until the artifact deck either pays into a dead end or watches its board crumble. The hoser as accountant, billing rent rather than building a wall.