Tourach's Chant

A pure hate card, built by a black deck to punish a single opposing color with a tax attached to keep it honest. The upkeep payment is the design discipline: you pay an extra black every turn to keep the threat live, so the card is not free repeatable damage but a sustained commitment against an opponent leaning on Forests. The second clause is the cruel part of the build. It does not simply deal three damage; it offers the green player a worse option, forcing them either to take the burn or to grind down their own board with a -1/-1 counter every time a Forest enters. That choice is where the punishment compounds: against a creature-heavy green deck, the counter route quietly dismantles the very threats the Forests were ramping toward, while the damage route stacks up fast against an opponent who needs to keep playing lands. Cards like this belonged to an era when Wizards designed narrow, color-specific haters as a matter of course, betting that black decks would face enough green to make the punishment land. The narrowness is total: against a deck running no Forests, it is a dead enchantment that asks you to pay black for nothing. That tension, a brutal effect gated behind both an upkeep tax and an opponent's specific manabase, is the kind of high-variance hate piece that defined the design language of its time and has almost entirely fallen out of fashion since.