Power Leak

An aura that enchants another enchantment rather than a creature, which marks it as a relic of an era before Wizards had settled the convention that auras attach to creatures by default. Targeting an opposing enchantment was a rare design choice, attempted only a handful of times in the game's earliest sets. The mechanical conceit is a pay-or-burn upkeep toll: each turn the enchanted permanent's controller faces a real decision, paying up to two mana to prevent the bleed or taking the damage and keeping their resources. Two is the ceiling, not the floor: pay nothing and eat the full two, pay both and take zero, so the bid is a fixed tax rather than a scaling one. It is a structural ancestor of the "pay or suffer" line the game would later refine into cards like Tangle Wire and Smokestack, designs that asked an opponent to bid resources every upkeep against a slowly tightening clock. What dated Power Leak almost immediately was the game's answer to enchantments: with Disenchant and its successors making enchantment removal cheap and reliable, slow-bleeding an opposing enchantment became pointless when you could simply destroy the thing you had attached to. It survives as a design reference point, a first pass at the tax archetype the game would not really know how to build around for another decade.