Pox Plague

The name announces the pedigree: this is the Pox design compressed into a single symmetrical detonation. Where the classic Pox lineage taxed players in fixed increments (lose a chunk of life, pitch a set number of cards, sacrifice a creature and a land apiece), this one scales the pain to whatever each player has. Half the life, half the hand, half the board, rounded down at every step, applied to everyone including the caster. That symmetry is the whole engine. A card like this is not built for parity: it is built for the player who has already broken it, someone hellbent with an empty hand and a board of expendable tokens, ready to halve nothing while the opponent halves everything. The five-black pip cost is a gate as much as a rate, locking the effect to decks committed enough to black that the mirror-tax cuts the caster least. The three steps also resolve in a fixed order with no window to respond between them, so a player cannot reach for interaction once the life loss lands to save their hand or their board. Attrition decks have always wanted a reset button that punishes the resource-rich more than the empty-handed, and this is that button drawn at maximum leverage: the Pox philosophy of "I have already lost everything worth losing" rendered as a five-mana sorcery.