Fade Away

A scaling tax keyed to each player's own board: every creature you control is one more permanent you have to ransom back, and the bill is paid individually, not from some shared battlefield count. The design lever is the " unless" clause, which turns what reads like a wipe into a resource squeeze. A player with mana up shrugs it off; a player tapped out hands over a permanent of their choice. That choice matters: this is not edict-style removal that strips the best creature, because the controller feeds in their weakest permanent instead. So the card rewards the caster who has first exhausted an opponent's mana before pulling the trigger, and it scales the wrong way for go-wide decks: the more creatures you have committed, the more you owe. The blue color identity is the giveaway. This is a tempo and tax tool dressed as disruption, designed to punish an overcommitted, tapped-out opponent at the precise moment they cannot pay, rather than to clear a board outright. It asks the caster to engineer the squeeze rather than to land a haymaker, which is why it sits closer in spirit to resource-denial effects than to any sweeper, even though the prompt on the table is "sacrifice a permanent." The symmetry is real but lopsided: whoever has fewer creatures and more open mana writes the better outcome.