Trespasser's Curse
Curse Auras occupy an odd corner of the design space: they sit on an opponent rather than a permanent you care about, so they have to earn their card by punishing something that player will keep doing anyway. The drain keys off creatures entering under the enchanted player's control, which quietly taxes the decks that flood the board: token strategies, go-wide aggro, anything that resolves three or four bodies a turn. Against those, each new creature swings two life across the table, and the symmetry of "they lose one, you gain one" matters more than the raw number, because it claws back the life total a swarm is trying to pressure. The wager is on rate of production: against a control shell or a single-threat plan that puts one body down and rides it, the drain fires once or twice and then goes idle, so the card's payoff scales with how eagerly the opponent commits to the board rather than with the game state at large. It also fires on every entry, not just casts, so it catches tokens, reanimation, and flicker effects that slip past the narrower "whenever they cast a creature spell" lifedrain designs. The single life per creature keeps the drip steady rather than punishing: this is friction that accumulates, not a lock. Its value is a read on the opponent's density of bodies, wearing an Aura's clothes.


