Freyalise's Winds

A symmetric tax on the act of tapping, built around the slow attrition Ice Age kept returning to. The mechanism is deceptively brutal: whenever any permanent taps it gains a wind counter, and the next untap step burns that counter instead of untapping the permanent. In practice nothing untaps on schedule anymore. Lands, creatures, mana rocks, anything that taps spends a full cycle locked down before it comes back online, halving the effective tempo of every player at once, the controller included. The card's identity lives in that symmetry: it does not stop you from tapping things, it just doubles the cost of doing so, and whoever taps least suffers least. That asymmetry hidden inside the symmetry is the whole point. A deck that needs very little mana per turn, or one that generates resources without tapping at all, slips out from under the tax while opponents stall. The lock's seam is precise: a permanent untapped by some outside effect (not its controller's untap step) sidesteps the prevention clause entirely, since only that specific window removes the counters. The tap still accrues a counter; what changes is which untap the lock catches. It is a stax piece long before "stax" was a word for it, leaning on the same counter bookkeeping Ice Age used to track time and decay across several cards. Punishing, mirror-symmetric, and demanding you build a clock the lock cannot slow.