Kataki, War's Wage
Hatebears rarely come this precisely targeted. Most white taxers raise the cost of casting things or hit a broad category; this one ignores the spell entirely and goes after artifacts that have already resolved, attaching a recurring upkeep tax that has to be paid every turn or the permanent dies. The effect is a symmetrical Smokestack pointed at a single card type: each artifact becomes a slow drain on its controller, and an opponent leaning on Signets, Sol Ring, Mox-style accelerants, or an equipment package suddenly pays a mana tithe just to keep the board they already built. Because the trigger fires on every upkeep, the pressure compounds over a long game in a way a one-shot Disenchant cannot. The body is the design discipline here: a fragile two-mana creature any artifact deck can answer, but answering it costs a card and a tempo beat, and until it dies the lock keeps grinding. It lands hardest against decks whose entire engine is artifacts, which is exactly the corner of the format white was given to police. The symmetry is real (your own artifacts pay too), so it asks you to build around the tax rather than under it, a constraint that has kept this kind of effect honest since the earliest prison decks. A scalpel for a specific problem, sized so it never becomes a maindeck default.




