Liability

A flat tax on death, applied to everyone at once. Every block, every chump, every sacrificed artifact ticks its controller down a life, and the enchantment never picks a side: it watches the board without touching it, draining whoever loses permanents fastest. That is precisely why it never matured into a serious win condition. Symmetrical attrition favors the player already ahead on the battlefield, who is rarely the one who spent three mana on an enchantment that affects no permanents directly. The token exclusion is the load-bearing clause: by triggering only on nontoken permanents, the text spares the disposable swarm and trains the drain on real, individually cast cards instead. A go-wide deck can flood the board, trade away an army of tokens, and pay nothing for it; a deck leaning on singular threats bleeds for every one it loses. As color-pie history it reads as black taxing the act of dying itself, an inversion of the usual black bargain where you spend life to buy power. Here the life loss is involuntary and universal, levied on the simple decision to commit creatures at all. It survives as a curiosity rather than a tool because its honesty about symmetry leaves no clean angle to break: a drain effect the controller cannot reliably aim, a clock with no hand on the dial.