Irini Sengir

A tax card built on an unusual seam: it punishes a single permanent type (enchantment spells) but only in two of the five colors, leaving blue, black, and red enchantments untaxed. That asymmetry is the entire idea. In an era when white and green leaned hardest on enchantments for their answers and engines, this was a black creature engineered to make those two colors pay extra to do the thing they most wanted to do. The surcharge is calibrated to delay a key turn without locking anyone out, which is what keeps it a tax rather than a prison. The body is incidental; nobody runs a 2/2 for the combat. The deeper design idea is an early attempt to fold sideboard-style hostility into a maindeck creature, pinning the hate to a mechanical category and then narrowing it by color rather than naming a single card. The Vampire Dwarf typing is its own curiosity, a combination that has stayed nearly unique, and the flavor (a Sengir vampire wrapped up in Homelands' tangled family politics) is the kind of deep-cut lore that set left behind. As a piece of design it reads as a thought experiment: how do you punish a strategy without naming it, and how narrow can a tax get before it stops mattering at all?