Malignant Growth

A Faustian bargain dressed as a Johnny enabler, and one of the cleaner illustrations of the cumulative upkeep era's appetite for cards that punish their own controller. The tradeoff is the whole pitch: you hand an opponent extra cards, but every card they draw off it burns them, and the growth counters pile up so the gift and the damage escalate together turn after turn. Left alone, it builds toward a kill that arrives through the opponent's own draw step. The catch is the meter running underneath it. Two separate counters fight over the card's lifespan: growth counters drive the payoff upward, while age counters from the cumulative upkeep make the enchantment cost one more mana to keep every turn. They climb in lockstep, so the same upkeep that makes the burn bigger also makes the permanent harder to afford, and the green-blue investment locks you into a color pair with no native way to make that math comfortable. That tension is the design in full: the longer it lives, the harder it hits and the harder it is to keep alive, and you are gambling that the burn outruns the cards you are feeding across the table before the upkeep crushes you or the opponent simply outdraws the damage. It belongs to a family of mid-nineties enchantments that weighed a powerful clock against a self-inflicted timer, a discipline the game largely set aside once cumulative upkeep was retired as a keyword.