Oath of Mages

Catch-up tech dressed as a political toy, and a snapshot of a moment when Wizards was actively building rubber-band mechanics into the color pie. The whole effect is gated behind a life-total inequality: a player can only ping someone who is ahead of them, which turns the enchantment into a slow leveling force rather than a clock anyone controls. It punishes the leader and idles entirely if you yourself are the one out front. That symmetry is the design discipline holding the rate down: at two mana for an enchantment, repeatable noncreature damage would be aggressively costed, so the card sells the power back by refusing to fire on behalf of whoever is winning. The trigger keys off each upkeep, with the active player choosing their target and deciding whether to deal the damage, so the pings accumulate one at a time across the table rather than concentrating. It belongs to the Exodus-era enchantments that legislate the game state from above, kin to Oath of Druids, handing players a recurring upkeep trigger that bends the board toward parity. The flavor and the mechanic line up cleanly: the more someone pulls ahead, the more the table is permitted to chip them down.