Ritual of Subdual

A symmetrical mana-base attack from a time when Wizards still trusted players to enjoy paying for their own prison effects. While it sits on the battlefield, every land in the game produces colorless instead of its proper color, which kneecaps any deck leaning on tight color requirements while leaving generic-cost strategies largely untouched. The catch is that it hurts you exactly as much as it hurts the table: this is a card built for a green deck that has already arranged to play around its own lock, whether through artifacts, colorless costs, or mana that comes from somewhere other than tapping lands. The cumulative upkeep keeps the effect from being permanent: each turn adds another age counter, and the per counter compounds fast, so the disruption is rented rather than owned. You get a window of a few turns to convert the chaos into a win before the enchantment eats your own mana and falls off. Ice Age used cumulative upkeep across the set as a balancing lever for effects that would otherwise be oppressive, and this is among its bluntest applications: a powerful symmetrical denial effect deliberately wired with an expiration timer, asking you to do something decisive with the asymmetry you can build around before the clock runs out.