Power Surge

A symmetrical punishment piece from the original design vocabulary, printed when an enchantment's job was still being defined by what it could do to the shape of a game rather than to any one permanent. The structural idea is that mana itself becomes the resource being taxed: leaving lands untapped to hold up answers, to play around something, to bluff a counterspell, all of it costs life now. The card does not care who you are; it cares that you are sitting on mana. That makes it a clock that punishes the player most committed to reactive play, and rewards the player willing to dump their hand and tap out. The asymmetry comes from deckbuilding, not from the card. Red, the color least interested in holding up mana, pays the smallest tax on its own enchantment and turns the global pressure into a one-sided race. The lineage from here runs through every "punish them for playing the game correctly" red enchantment Wizards has printed since: Manabarbs, Sulfuric Vortex, Ankh of Mishra in artifact clothing. None of those are quite this card, but all of them are downstream of the question Power Surge asked first, which is whether the act of having mana available should itself be a cost.