Propaganda

The original tax-the-attacker enchantment, and the one every successor has been measured against. Where a Wall of Omens or a Fog buys time by blunting a single turn of combat, this taxes the decision to attack at all: an opponent who wants to send three creatures at you has to find six mana before damage enters the equation, and that math compounds every turn the board grows. The elegance is that it never actually stops anyone; it just prices aggression out of reach, which lets a control deck spend its own mana on the things that win the game rather than on reactive blockers. The design has been copied closely enough that the effect almost reads as a template: Ghostly Prison ported the same skeleton into white, Sphere of Safety scaled the tax to enchantment count, and Norn's Annex bolted a Phyrexian-mana clause onto the structure. What keeps the original distinct is the tightness of the rate (a one-card defensive wall that asks nothing of the rest of your deck) and the fact that it taxes per-attacker rather than per-attack, so going wide is punished harder than swinging with a single threat. It is the cleanest statement of a design idea that turned out to have a whole color-pie's worth of variations inside it.