Ethereal Grasp

Perpetual is the mechanic that made a card like this possible: an effect that follows the target across zones and turns, sticking to the creature the way an Aura would but without a permanent anyone can remove. A normal tap effect buys you exactly one combat step; this converts that single tap into a permanent condition, layering on a Frost Titan-style "doesn't untap" clause plus an untap cost so steep that paying it is almost never the play. In practice it is soft removal that never kills anything, pricing a threat's participation out of reach rather than answering it. The digital-only origin is baked into the design: perpetual only functions in a client that can track a state change on a card object between zones, which is why the effect can promise "perpetually" at all. That constraint is also its ceiling. Because the creature is only tapped, not neutralized, it dodges nothing that cares about the body still sitting on the battlefield. The one instinct to correct is the idea that an external untap resets the situation: it doesn't. The "doesn't untap during your untap step" clause is granted perpetually, so an outside untap effect frees the creature for a single turn and then the tax reasserts itself on the next untap step. The design is less an answer than an ongoing debuff, closer in spirit to a Claustrophobia that can never be enchant-removed than to any clean piece of interaction.