Festering Wound

The clock built into this aura runs in two directions at once. On each of your upkeeps you may add an infection counter; on each of the enchanted creature's controller's upkeeps, the aura deals damage equal to those counters straight to that player's face. The growth is yours to pace, but the payout fires on the opponent's turn, so the burn is never a single moment of removal. It is a slowly escalating obligation: deal with this, or watch the increments stack. The card targets a creature but punishes the player, an inversion of the usual aura logic where the enchanted thing is the victim. Here the creature is just the anchor; its controller is the one bleeding. That split makes the design slow and inevitable rather than reactive, a piece of attrition that rewards patience over tempo. The optional counter is the quiet discipline: you choose whether to advance the clock, which lets you bluff a stall or hold the escalation if you would rather not provoke an answer. It belongs to a lineage of black "creeping doom" enchantments that win by accumulation instead of by any single big swing, a threat that asks the table to respect a card doing almost nothing early and a great deal once the counters pile up.