Snake Cult Initiation

A timeshifted preview of a keyword the game had not yet committed to: poisonous turns up here bolted onto an Aura years before poison counters got a dedicated push, the mechanic tried on for size before it had a home. The structural idea is what makes it worth a second look. Most Auras want to swell a body or grant evasion; this one stacks a second clock on top of the first. The enchanted creature still deals its ordinary combat damage to the opponent's life total, but every connection now also lands three poison counters, and a player who reaches ten loses outright regardless of how high their life has climbed. That parallel track is the point: lifegain buys time against the damage but does nothing against the counters, so four connections, spread across any number of turns, simply end the game. The tension lives in delivery. Poisonous triggers only on combat damage to a player, so the Aura is worthless on a creature that cannot get through and lethal on one that reliably does. Hand it an evasive or unblockable body and ordinary beatdown converts into an inexorable, life-total-agnostic countdown. The choice of black is its own footnote: this is an early sketch of the poison space that infect would later split between green and black, and it lands on one of those two colors well before the mechanic had settled into a coherent identity there.