Mist of Stagnation

A Stasis variant that swaps the upkeep tax for a graveyard clock, and the swap is what makes it strange. The first line is Winter Orb's nightmare scenario printed onto a single permanent: nothing untaps, ever, by default. Where Stasis demanded you feed it an upkeep cost and find a way to break parity, this asks nothing and instead hands each player a release valve tied to a resource that tends to grow: their own graveyard. Early on, when both yards are thin, the lock bites hard, and a player with a single fetched land or a couple of cantrips in the bin claws back almost nothing. The design tension is that the valve scales with attrition, so the player who manages the two graveyards best decides who stays locked. The controller wants their own bin fat (every card in it untaps a permanent) and the opponent's bin starved (an empty graveyard untaps nothing). The asymmetry, then, is not in the text (it is perfectly symmetric) but in who can stuff their own graveyard while keeping the opponent's bare: a self-mill or dredge-style engine to fuel your own untaps, paired with graveyard hate to keep theirs at zero. It is a control piece that rewards gorging one yard and starving the other, a far weirder axis than "tax their lands," and it explains why it never settled into a clean home the way its harder-locking cousins did.