Quest for the Nihil Stone
Discard decks have always carried the same structural debt: stripping an opponent's hand is a tempo investment that produces no clock of its own. You spend your turns making them play off the top while they spend theirs drawing toward an answer. This is a one-mana payoff aimed squarely at that gap, a win condition that triggers off the very thing a hand-disruption deck is already doing. The two-counter threshold is the only friction, and it is a low one: the first ability watches every individual card discarded, so a single spell that forces two or more pitches arms the enchantment in one cast. From there the kill checks at the start of each opponent's upkeep, and that timing window is the whole point. Upkeep precedes the draw step, so a hellbent opponent loses the five life before they ever see the top of their library; the topdeck that would refill their hand comes a beat too late to matter. Five life every upkeep, indefinitely, turns the enchantment into a metronome the opponent cannot mute once their hand is gone: keep them empty and the increments stack toward lethal on their own schedule, no further input required. The result is a payoff that asks the discard archetype to commit fully to its own plan rather than treating disruption as a prelude to a separate finisher. It is the rare enchantment that converts the act of denial into the victory condition, closing the loop that hand attack usually leaves open.
