God-Pharaoh's Statue

The Sphere of Resistance effect, scaled up and married to a clock. Taxing everything an opponent casts by two mana is an old prison staple, going back to the early Winter Orb school of stax pieces that punish decks for wanting to spend their turns doing things. The end-step drain is what separates this from the flat resource-denial artifacts of that lineage: a taxing permanent that would otherwise sit inert while both players grind eventually kills the table on its own. That combination resolves the classic weakness of pure tax effects, which is that they slow the game without ever ending it, leaving the pilot to find a separate win condition through the same friction they imposed. Here the lock and the clock are the same permanent. The tax hits every spell an opponent casts, not just the noncreature ones, so it bites hardest against decks built on volume and cheap interaction, precisely the decks that would otherwise dismantle a stax board before the drain matters. Six mana with no color requirement is the price for asymmetry this broad: it costs nothing on your own side of the table, and once it lands it forces opponents into a race they are structurally behind in, paying two extra for every answer while losing a life each turn they fail to remove it.