Smokestack

The cruelest engine in the prison-deck playbook works by escalation, and the escalation is symmetric on paper but asymmetric in practice. Each soot counter you choose to add raises the sacrifice tax for everyone, including yourself, but the player piloting it builds to pay that tax with tokens, sacrifice fodder, and recursion the opponent does not have. The crucial clause is the optional first one: you control the throttle. You can sit at a single counter, grinding one permanent off each player every turn until the opponent has nothing left and you still have a board, or you can let it climb and detonate. What keeps the engine honest against its own pilot is that the counters never come off on their own, so the lock that strips an opponent of permanents will eventually strangle you too if left to run; you build the deck to win before that happens, often by pairing it with effects that empty lands and creatures faster than the opponent can rebuild. It is the centerpiece of the stax archetype's identity, the card that named a whole approach to the game: not winning the board but denying it, turn after turn, until the opponent's deck simply stops functioning. Few cards ask their pilot to accept so much pain to inflict slightly more on everyone else.