Thumbscrews

A punishment artifact pointed inward: most "ping the opponent each turn" permanents ask nothing of their controller, but this one only fires while you are sitting on a full grip of five or more cards. That threshold is the entire engine, and it inverts the usual relationship between card advantage and pressure. Normally a deck that hoards answers wants to deploy them; here, hoarding is the cost of admission. The card rewards a control or attrition plan that naturally floats a deep hand, turning excess cards (the thing those decks accumulate anyway) into a slow, repeating clock that fires once per upkeep. The damage is small and only triggers on your own turn, so it shapes how a grind resolves rather than threatening to close out a game by itself; the incremental drain matters across a dozen turns of a stalled board. The colorless cost means any deck willing to honor the five-card discipline could run it, which is why it reads as a clean statement of a single idea rather than a tuned role-player. Its whole personality lives in the friction between the two halves of a control deck's instinct: the trigger pays you for keeping cards in reserve, but every card you spend on interaction is a card off the threshold, so you have to weigh defending yourself against keeping the clock alive.