Pyrohemia

Pestilence transposed into red, a color-shifted echo of one of black's most defining repeatable-damage enchantments, and the swap is more pointed than it first reads. Black's symmetrical wrath-on-a-stick lived in a color that gains and pays life freely, so the mirror damage to players was a resource the controller could outlast. Red has no comparable life engine, which makes the : deal 1 to everything ability a genuinely double-edged lever: every activation that grinds down the opposing board also walks the controller toward the same cliff. The self-sacrifice clause is the structural tax that keeps it from becoming a permanent prison. If no creatures are on the battlefield at the end step, it falls off, so it cannot sit indefinitely as a parity-locking machine the way an unconditional ping engine would. The clause cuts in a counterintuitive direction: you cannot sweep the table clean and keep the engine running, because an empty board takes the enchantment with it. At least one creature has to survive to the end step, which turns the ability into an exercise in stopping one ping short rather than pinging to zero. That tension is the design's whole point: a board-control engine handed to the color least equipped to survive its own symmetry, rewarding a pilot who fields high-toughness bodies that outlive the smaller things across the table while reserving the burn for opposing life totals. It is repeatable removal that doubles as a clock on its own controller.