Subversion

Five mana for a single point of drain per upkeep is a rate no tuned deck has ever taken seriously, and the slowness of that clock defines everything about the card. The swing is real but small: each opponent loses a life, you gain it back, so two players move two points apart per cycle. Triggering on your upkeep means the enchantment alone needs the game to crawl far past twenty turns before it closes anything, and as an enchantment it dies to any of the disenchant effects that answer enchantments and artifacts long before then. An opponent who untaps with the threat staring at them simply removes it on their own turn, and the trigger never fires; there is no "sticks and becomes untouchable" here. What it represents is the symmetry that has always defined this corner of black's design: every point lost is a point gained, so the card never trades life for tempo, only accumulates an edge that compounds if the game refuses to end. It sits in the lineage of slow attrition payoffs black has revisited for decades, but built for a grind rather than an engine. The game has since found cheaper, faster versions of the same incremental-drain idea, which is why this printing reads as an early sketch of a now-common template: the concept arriving before the rate caught up to it.