Putrefaction

A color tax aimed squarely at the pair that builds fair, controlling Magic. The text reads symmetrical, but the player who installs it simply runs a deck thin on green and white spells and turns the asymmetry adversarial: every Wrath, every Disenchant, every green creature an opponent casts now costs a card from hand on top of its mana. The wrinkle is where it bites. Most discard punishes hoarding cards or attacking; this one charges for the act of casting, a tax that compounds across a long game and lands hardest precisely when an opponent is digging for answers and casting more, not fewer, spells. What keeps it off the staple list is that the enchantment never closes a game by itself: it deals no damage, blocks nothing, and leaves the caster to convert the resource drain into an actual win while paying five mana up front for an effect that matters against only two of the five colors, and only when the table is playing them. That conditionality made it a slow, situational lever rather than a reliable one. As a snapshot of late-90s color-hosing, where the design team still printed enchantments built like a wall against a specific neighbor, it captures the era's appetite for asymmetric punishment dressed as a symmetrical rule.