In the Eye of Chaos

A tax on the entire instant-speed game, expressed as a World Enchantment so only one can ever exist at a time. The card works on two axes at once that no later printing has quite repeated. First, it scales: a Counterspell costs two to protect, a Force of Will costs five, a Cryptic Command costs four, so the tax is not a flat number but a pressure curve that punishes the expensive answers most. Second, the World rule makes it self-policing in a way blue control rarely accepts; play a second copy, or let an opponent resolve theirs, and yours goes to the graveyard. The result is a lock piece that legislates rather than denies, since opponents can always pay, but every payment is a tempo concession that compounds across a game. It belongs to a brief window of Legends design where the team was willing to print global rules-text that rewrote whole phases of the game (the same instinct produced Mana Drain, The Abyss, and Nether Void). What sets this one apart from its cycle-mates is its axis of attack. It does not single out a color or hose a particular effect; it taxes a whole speed of play, asking every legal format to decide whether instants are still the language of interaction or whether the conversation has been moved to the upkeep.