Tourach's Gate

Decay built directly into the card: the Aura wants to feed itself constantly, since each Thrull you sacrifice buys three turns of life, and without that fuel it withers off your land one upkeep at a time until it dies. That time-counter clock makes the whole thing a sustained tax rather than a one-time investment, tying the Aura's survival to a steady supply of disposable bodies, exactly the kind of bodies the set's Thrull subtheme was printing in volume. The payoff is a combat trick stapled to a land: tap the enchanted land and your attackers swing for two more power at the cost of a point of toughness, an asymmetric pump that rewards a wide, expendable board and punishes a narrow one. The +2/-1 shape is the tell; it is not a survivability buff but a damage-maximizer, leaning your team's whole math toward connecting once rather than trading repeatedly. Nearly everything about it points back to a single archetype intention: a Thrull engine that converts a renewable creature resource into recurring offensive pressure, with an upkeep cost ensuring you cannot simply set it and forget it. The design asks a single card to carry an unusual amount of bookkeeping and an unusual amount of commitment to one tribe, a willingness Wizards has largely abandoned in the decades since.