Pillar Tombs of Aku

A symmetrical tax that asks the table to feed it or bleed, and a textbook study in how the World enchantment type was designed to police its own power. The card forces a choice at every upkeep, yours included: pony up a creature or take five and end the engine. That self-destruct clause is the structural pressure valve. The effect is brutal in the abstract (a recurring creature tithe that hits every player), but the moment any single player refuses to pay, the enchantment dies. So the card is only as strong as the table's collective willingness to keep sacrificing. It punishes creature-light strategies hardest, since a player with no spare bodies has no choice but to bleed; and any opponent willing to eat five life can knock the whole thing over on their own upkeep, no matter how many creatures the rest of the table is hoarding. The World supertype layers on a second governor: it enforces a uniqueness rule across the battlefield, so a second World permanent entering play kills the first. Between that supertype restriction and the built-in concession that ends it, this is a high-ceiling lock that was deliberately engineered never to lock for long: the kind of conditional, self-limiting design black got in this era, when symmetrical punishment was a recurring theme rather than a one-sided edict.