Heat Wave

A red anti-blocking enchantment that reads like an attempt to encode "no good blocks" into the permanent layer rather than the burst of a single combat trick. The split between the two block-prohibition clauses is the design's signature: against blue it is absolute, while everything else can still block by paying a life tax that scales with the number of blockers committed. That asymmetry frames the card as a hard counter to a specific kind of defensive deck, with a softer per-blocker toll falling on the rest of the table; crucially, that life is paid by the opponent declaring blockers, not by you. The cumulative upkeep is the discipline holding it together: a static "your attacks resolve" enchantment with no recurring cost would have been a runaway lock, so the card asks for an escalating red payment each turn, meaning the window where it dominates the combat step narrows as the game goes long. It rewards a deck built to close before the upkeep mana outruns the board, then walk away from the enchantment once it has done its work. The targeted hate at blue specifically marks it as a creature of its era's color-pie disputes, when red's frustration with blue's permission and bounce was expressed not just in burn but in mechanically pointed answers like this one. Outside that context it is a curiosity: a permanent that tries to make combat a one-sided affair, charging the defender in life and the attacker only in escalating mana.