Purging Scythe

Repeating-damage artifacts are usually pointed weapons: you aim them at the threat you want gone and grind it out. This one strips away the aiming entirely. Every upkeep it hammers whatever has the least toughness, friend or foe, and the only steering it grants is breaking ties when two creatures are level. That single constraint defines the whole card. It is a slow recurring sweep tuned against exactly the boards that lean on fragility: token swarms, mana dorks, one-toughness utility creatures, the chaff that fair decks build their engines on. The damage is locked at 2, so it never grows into a finisher, and anything sturdy enough to soak 2 a turn simply ignores it. The trade is that your own small creatures stand in the same line of fire, and the trigger fires only on your turn, so opponents get a full rotation to rebuild between pulses. The result is a colorless control piece whose value runs inversely to the size of the board it faces: dead weight across the table from a single fatty, suffocating against a wide deck full of small bodies. It reads as an early-era answer to a specific design problem: how to give any color a grinding anti-swarm effect without handing it a clean, repeatable burn engine it could point wherever it pleased.