Festering Evil

A symmetrical attrition clock dressed as a black enchantment, built on the oldest tension in the color: black pays for its effects with its own resources, and here the resource is your life total alongside everyone else's. The upkeep trigger grinds every player and the board down a point at a time, which means the deck running it has to be the one that wins the race to zero, either through a faster clock or a higher starting buffer. The sacrifice mode turns the slow drip into a finisher, a one-time three-point sweep that can clear a board of small creatures and shock every player in the same gesture. What makes the design honest is that there is no off switch: once it resolves, it keeps hurting you until you either pull the trigger or it kills you. That is the friction that prices the symmetry. It rewards a build that can absorb the recoil, lifegain or a low curve that empties its hand before the damage accumulates, and punishes anyone who plays it as raw removal without a plan to come out ahead. It sits in the lineage of black's self-damaging board control, the school that would later run through Pestilence and its kin, where the question is never what the card does to the table but whether you can survive doing it.