Manacles of Decay

The base text does only one thing: it stops a creature from attacking, leaving it free to block, which is a softer lock than a full Pacifism and the reason the activated outlets exist at all. Both are paid for in enemy colors. The black activation chips toughness one point at a time, repeatable enough to grind down a small body or finish one already weakened. The red activation strips the creature out of blocking for a turn, flipping a defensive leash into an offensive enabler by clearing a blocker out of your attack. The tension is structural. Neither outlet does anything in a deck that cannot produce black or red mana, so a mono-white pilot is sitting on a strictly worse attack-stopper, while a three-color shell that already runs both colors gets a flexible permanent doing removal-adjacent work without ever being a removal spell. This is one of the cleaner products of an early-era experiment in pricing extra modes at enemy-color costs, rewarding decks that stretched their manabase to reach abilities their primary color could not natively make. It is also one of the more honest entries in that line, because both activations do something a white player would genuinely want (incremental shrinkage, combat manipulation) and the price for each is a real commitment to colors white does not pay for itself.