Infinite Hourglass

An escalating Anthem that arms both armies, which is the design joke buried in its symmetry. The boost grows every one of your upkeeps, so left alone it tilts the math harder and harder toward the side with more bodies; but the buyback clause hands the leash to anyone, not just the controller, and only during an upkeep step. That timing restriction is the whole tension. Removing a counter costs three mana and can only be done in someone's upkeep, so a defending player can pay to shrink the swing before combat, but only at a tempo cost and only inside that one step of the beginning phase. It turns the artifact into a slow bidding war: the controller pays nothing to ratchet it up, while opponents pay three at a time, repeatedly, to claw it back down. This belongs to a wave of slow-burning engines from its era (the cumulative-upkeep cards, the snow-permanent payoffs), built for effects that compound across turns rather than resolve in one. The counter never caps and the buff applies to every creature on the battlefield, so the math becomes a sledgehammer for a wide board and a liability everywhere else. It is less a card you cast to win than a clock you start and dare the table to outpace.