Errant Minion

A taxing aura that puts the squeeze on the wrong player. Most enchantments that punish a creature's controller do so on a flat clock: an upkeep ping, a static drain, a tax you either pay or eat. This one inverts the framing by making the damage optional to prevent, but only at a price set by the controller's own resources. Each upkeep, the enchanted creature's controller chooses whether to bleed mana into a prevention shield or take two to the face, which means the aura does its real work not as removal but as a tempo drain: every point of mana spent dodging the damage is a point not spent developing the board or holding up a response. The design lives in that recurring micro-decision, a small tax compounded across turns rather than a single decisive hit. It is a slow, attritional tool from an era when blue's disruption leaned toward the patient and the indirect, before counterspells and bounce hardened into the color's identity. The two damage per upkeep makes it slow to close a game on its own, which is exactly the point: the threat is the upkeep tithe, paid over and over, while the enchantment sits on a creature its controller would rather not have flagged.