Musician

Cumulative upkeep usually reads as a self-inflicted wound, a tax that grows on your own permanent until you sacrifice it. This card weaponizes the mechanic by handing it to someone else: each tap drops a music counter on a target creature and installs a private upkeep clock on it, escalating one mana per counter until that creature's controller either pays the rising tax or loses the board piece. The symmetry is the whole point. The Musician carries its own cumulative upkeep at the same time, wilting on a parallel clock while it forces another permanent to wilt, so both players are watching a meter climb and the one who runs out of mana or patience first surrenders a creature. The 1/3 body is not the threat; this is a slow attritional siege engine that wins by erosion rather than combat. Because the music counters stack and the upkeep cost scales with them, repeated taps eventually outrun even a controller content to pay the first few. The complication is structural: the Musician's own escalating tax tends to expire before the song finishes, since paying its upkeep grows just as fast as the burden it imposes. The result is one clock racing another, and Ice Age's design dares the controller to keep tapping while their own counters pile toward the breaking point.