Pendrell Mists

A symmetrical tax on existence itself, and one of the purest distillations of the "everything pays upkeep" design current that ran through this era. Where most enchantments punishing creatures pick a side, this one rewrites the upkeep step for every creature on the table, the controller's own included. The genius is in who actually pays: the player flooding the board with bodies bleeds a mana per creature every turn, while the player running a lean count of expensive, individually impactful threats barely notices the bill. It functions as a soft creature-count ceiling rather than a wrath, asphyxiating go-wide strategies and token swarms without ever destroying anything outright. The friction lives entirely in the sacrifice clause: each creature is sacrificed individually unless its controller pays, so the cost scales linearly with how greedy the board has gotten. That structure makes it a control card disguised as an even-handed enchantment; you build around it by simply fielding fewer creatures than your opponent, or none, and let the upkeep trigger do the pruning. Effects that tax permanents per-turn rather than gating them at the point of cast are a design space Wizards has revisited cautiously, precisely because the asymmetry here is real even when the text reads perfectly fair.