Mine Is the Only Truth
Most ongoing schemes want to overstay their welcome: they stay face up doing incremental damage until the whole table can gang up on the Archenemy. This one is built on the opposite instinct, a self-terminating engine that fires hard and then deliberately clears itself out. Because Archenemy pits one villain against a coordinated team, every spell that team casts to mount its counterattack pays a toll straight into the Archenemy's hand, so the more the opposition mobilizes, the faster the villain refills. The upkeep clause is the counterweight: it checks whether a card was drawn during the turn immediately before, and if so, abandons the scheme. In practice that means the scheme almost always retires after a single active turn cycle, since the team can rarely go a full turn without casting anything. The trigger keys strictly on the previous turn, not on a long stretch of quiet, so the only way to keep it face up is for the opposing team to fall completely silent for a turn, which in a format about pressuring the Archenemy is closer to conceding tempo than exploiting a loophole. It reads as a burst valve rather than a persistent tax: a front-loaded card advantage swing that rewards the villain for provoking action, then steps aside to let the scheme deck cycle toward the next threat.
