Vile Consumption

A slow, taxing attrition engine dressed as a board sweeper. Rather than killing anything outright, it puts a per-upkeep life tax on every creature in play, and the tax falls on the controller as readily as on opponents. That symmetry is both the design and the trouble: since you pay the same toll, the card belongs to a deck built to win on a depleted board, one running few creatures, a hard finisher, or a clock that outpaces the bleeding. It punishes go-wide strategies hardest, because each token and each weenie demands its own payment, and a player flooded with bodies hemorrhages life turn after turn until the board thins itself. This is the grinding, inevitability-first school of early black-blue control, which preferred surviving the math to dictating it: an answer that asks you to outlast the symmetry rather than break it. The friction is also what keeps it off most tables. A sweeper you can simply pay around is a sweeper opponents will pay around, and the life tax is mild enough that a control deck holding a handful of creatures barely registers it. The truest framing is as a board-control piece for a deck that intends to commit nothing to the board itself, turning the battlefield into a resource your opponents cannot afford to fill.