Lim-Dûl's Hex

A symmetrical tax engine from an era when Magic still trusted players to find the upside in a card that hurts everyone, including its controller. The design logic is the upkeep toll: each turn it pings every player for a single point unless they pay either a black mana or three generic, which turns a trivial drip of damage into a recurring decision about how dearly each player values that mana against the life. The numbers are deliberately small because the pressure is meant to compound, not to close a game on its own; a single point a turn is the kind of clock that only matters when you have stacked it with other incremental costs or you are racing a life total already in the danger zone. The friction sits in that "for each player" clause, which forces the controller to pay the tax too or eat the same damage everyone else does, so the card rewards a build that can shrug off either the mana drain or the chip damage better than the table can. It belongs to a school of Ice Age enchantments that asked players to absorb a symmetric cost for an asymmetric advantage, the same conversation that ran through cards like Stasis: the effect is even, but the deck around it is not.