Grievous Wound

Enchantments that lock off life gain are an old idea; enchantments that punish a player for every point of damage they take are the interesting half of this Aura. The lifegain lock does the setup work, closing the escape hatch, but the halving trigger is the payload: once this resolves, any damage at all, a single point from a lowly attacker or a ping, sends the enchanted player through a halving. That turns arithmetic into geometry, because the size of each hit stops mattering once the loop is online. A player at forty takes a single point down to thirty-nine, then loses half of that rounded up (twenty) and lands at nineteen; the next connection drops them to eighteen, then loses nine to leave nine, and so on. The damage that gets them there no longer needs to scale, only recur. It rewrites what reach means for a deck that can connect repeatedly for small amounts. And because the loss rounds up rather than down, the halving actually closes out low totals where a rounding-down effect like Heartless Hidetsugu stalls: a player knocked down to two by combat, say, loses one more to the trigger and sits at one, and the next hit finishes it cleanly. The lifegain clause is what keeps the whole descent from being unwound by a single stabilizing gain on the way down. Read together, the two lines describe a card built not to deal damage but to make everyone else's damage lethal.