Merseine

A lockdown effect priced in the defender's own currency: the net counters keep the creature from untapping, and the only way to free it is for the creature's controller to repeatedly pay its mana cost, once per counter, three times over. That second clause is the design hinge. Most Auras that disable a creature are a flat trade, one card to neuter one threat. This one builds in a ransom mechanism: the opponent can buy the creature back, but only by sinking real mana into a tax that scales with the creature's own cost. Lock down a cheap creature and the ransom is trivial; lock down something expensive and you have effectively levied that cost a second time, spread across multiple turns, while the creature sits idle. The asymmetry is deliberate, the kind of fiddly, resource-attrition design that the early sets leaned into before the templating settled. The net-counter framing also means the lock is not permanent: it degrades on the opponent's schedule, not yours, which makes it a tempo tool with a built-in expiration rather than a clean removal answer. It reads as flavor (a fishing net loosened strand by strand) but the structure is a tax that the most threatening targets pay the steepest.