Feroz's Ban

A symmetric tax on the most-cast spell type in the game, and a relic of how early design thought about the word "fair." The premise is austere: make every creature in the game harder to deploy, then let the player who needs creatures least come out ahead. That is the whole strategy. A deck built to win without committing bodies (burn, mill, an artifact-based clock) lands the two-mana surcharge on the opponent's plan and not its own. The flaw is the same as the premise: at six mana with no other text, it merely deepens a game you have presumably already spent six mana grinding to a halt. The tax also fails to distinguish threats from chaff, so it punishes a topdecked vanilla creature exactly as hard as a bomb. Later prison pieces learned the lesson and asymmetry became the point: effects that hose creatures while exempting your own, or that turn the tax into life loss or card disadvantage rather than a flat mana bump. Feroz's Ban is the honest, undiscriminating ancestor of that lineage, a control tool built when a static "everything is worse now" effect was thought to carry its own weight. The card is closer to a design prompt than a finished answer, and the rest of the game eventually answered it better.