Torment of Scarabs

Three life a turn is the headline number, but the real design is a tax that hands the choice to the victim. Every upkeep the enchanted player picks the cheapest of three outs: bleed three, pitch a card, or sacrifice a nonland permanent of their choosing. The life loss only lands when they have nothing they want to spare, so this is less a clock than a slow resource grind that thins a hand or strips a board over several turns. That structure puts it in the lineage of attrition curses that win by accumulation rather than burst: it does nothing on entry and asks the controller to already be ahead enough that every payment stings. The "of their choice" clause is what keeps a slow-bleed enchantment from tipping into oppression: the curse never names the card or the permanent, so an opponent with chaff to discard or spare tokens to feed it can stall the bleed indefinitely (and lands, notably, are never valid fodder, which quietly narrows the sacrifice option late in a game where a player is topdecking). Where it bites is the opponent who has emptied their hand and committed everything to a board they cannot afford to shed, the exact spot where each available payment hurts. Built for a grinding black shell that wants to convert a modest lead into an inescapable one, it punishes the player who has already gone all in.