Energy Vortex

A taxing engine dressed up as a clock, and one of Mirage's clearest attempts to turn costs into an ongoing negotiation instead of a single payment settled once. The structure is a pressure system: on your upkeep the counters reset to zero, so any tax you build evaporates and has to be rebuilt every turn from your available mana. That reset is the whole design discipline. It stops the enchantment from snowballing into a permanent stranglehold and forces you to choose, every single turn, how much mana you can spare to load it up against how much you need elsewhere. The chosen opponent faces a symmetrical decision in the opposite direction: pay one mana per counter, or eat three damage. Because you dump mana into it during your own upkeep and the opponent must answer on theirs, the card lives in the seam between two players' resource curves, draining whoever blinks. The damage is fixed and small, which tells you what the card actually wants to be: not a burn finisher but a slow mana-denial tax, choking the chosen player's development while the rest of your deck does the work. It belongs to a stretch of design when Wizards trusted counters and upkeep triggers to carry an entire interaction by themselves, and reading it today is a reminder of how much bookkeeping the early game asked players to track by hand.