Aboshan, Cephalid Emperor

The mass-tapper at the bottom is the headline effect, but it costs three blue mana and asks a real question: which side of a stalled board benefits from freezing every grounded creature? The answer is whoever holds the fliers, and that points directly at the kind of Cephalid-and-merfolk control shell Odyssey was building around blue's tribal identity. The first ability is the quieter, sneakier engine: tapping your own Octopus to tap any permanent turns each Octopus into a Icy Manipulator that recurs every turn, locking down a blocker, a creature trying to attack, or a land before an opponent can use it. Two abilities that both produce tap effects, but they scale differently. The mass tap is a one-shot blowout that clears a path; the Octopus tap is a slow, repeatable strangle that gets stronger the more tentacled bodies sit beside the Emperor. The friction is the tribe itself: Octopus is a thin creature type, so the repeatable ability only comes online in a deck deliberately stocked with them, and the card was clearly drawn to anchor exactly that build rather than slot into a generic blue deck. As a flavor object he lands too: a 3/3 legendary Octopus Noble ruling a sunken empire, ordering the seas to still themselves while his subjects pin the surface dwellers in place. The mechanics read as a king commanding his court, and that coherence is rarer than the rate suggests.