Forbidden Ritual

A symmetry trick dressed as a Diabolic Edict, built around a loop that punishes the caster as hard as the opponent. Each iteration asks you to feed a nontoken permanent into the ritual, after which the opponent picks the cheapest exit: lose 2 life, sacrifice anything they like, or pitch a card. The design tension is entirely in who runs out of fuel first. You are spending real permanents off your own board to force them to make trivial decisions, so the card only sharpens into a finisher when your own sacrifices cost you nothing (token generation aside, since the ritual explicitly bars tokens) and the opponent has nothing cheap left to give up. That self-immolation is what stops the open-ended repeat clause from becoming a one-card kill: the spell hands the choice to the defender at every step, and a defender with a wide board or a full grip simply shrugs through the life loss. It reads like a combo enabler and plays like a resource-attrition puzzle, which is the kind of friction Visions-era black specialized in: powerful effects that demand you pay in your own permanents rather than in mana alone. The result is a card whose ceiling depends entirely on building a board the opponent cannot match, and whose floor is handing them a free pile of choices for four mana.