Nettling Curse

Punishment Auras like this one belong to a small, awkward family: the curse that taxes a creature's controller for using it, leaving them stuck with a body they would rather not move. The 3-life loss on attack or block is the kind of recurring penalty that turns a defensive blocker into a liability and an attacker into a slow self-inflicted bleed, but the curse alone is passive: it does nothing if the opponent simply leaves the creature home. The red activation is what gives the design teeth, and it is also the source of its identity: a splashed activation that forces the enchanted creature to attack, dragging the controller's own creature into a swing they did not want and charging them 3 life for the privilege. That pairing converts a wait-and-see Aura into a repeatable pressure valve, a way to tax a single key creature out of the game over a few turns. The trouble has always been the friction of the model: it is a two-color answer that hangs on one creature, it lets the opponent choose when to eat the loss whenever it triggers off their own attacks or blocks, and it asks you to spend mana every turn to keep forcing the issue. It reads as a clever solution to the problem of how to build a punishment effect the opponent cannot simply ignore, and the forced-attack clause is the honest answer; the rest of the card is just slow enough to keep that cleverness from mattering much.