Royal Decree

The punishment fires on an act the opponent can barely avoid: the simple tapping of a Swamp, a Mountain, or any black or red permanent draws a point of damage, so a deck whose plan is to tap colored permanents repeatedly bleeds itself a little with every normal turn. But the effect is not free on your side either, and that is the design's whole tension. The cumulative upkeep clock runs against its own controller: the white cost climbs every turn an age counter accrues, so this cannot sit indefinitely the way later set-and-forget anti-color prisons would. It demands a recurring mana commitment that scales until you close the game or let the enchantment go. The reach is broad in an unusual way, catching both a land subtype and a color across two of the five colors, which makes it less a surgical answer and more a wide drag on an entire archetype's tempo. The card descends from a cumulative-upkeep design philosophy that asked the player to weigh a recurring resource drain against a recurring effect, a tension Magic's design has largely retired in favor of one-time costs and finality counters. The damage per trigger is almost negligible in isolation, but it compounds: against the right opponent, ordinary sequencing becomes a slow self-inflicted wound. The catch is that both clocks tick at once, and the controller has to keep paying to keep the bleed going.