Worry Beads

Most mill from this early era pointed across the table and tried to bury an opponent's library; this artifact instead loops a single card off the top of everyone's deck at every upkeep, with no off switch and no exception for its controller. The result is not removal at all but a shared clock, one that advances three times in a four-player game before the turn returns to you, indifferent to who is ahead. Whoever profits is the player who has already reclassified the graveyard as a resource: a reanimator pilot, a self-mill engine, anyone treating the bin as a second hand rather than a loss. For the rest of the table it is flat attrition that costs its controller nothing to maintain and demands no targeting, no activation, no further mana. Three colorless to install, then it just sits and counts down equally for everybody until somebody bothers to destroy it. The design is interesting precisely because it refuses to take sides: it is a permanent that punishes thin libraries and rewards graveyard decks without ever choosing which player it is doing either to. The flavor closes the loop neatly, a string of beads worked over and over without stopping, anxiety rendered as a static board state that nobody at the table can quite ignore.