Alchor's Tomb

Color is one of Magic's load-bearing properties, and this card treats it as a knob you can turn at will: any permanent you control, any color, the change holding until something overwrites it. The activation is open-ended in a way modern design has largely abandoned, and the trick that justifies the build-around is the timing. The ability carries no restriction, so it works at instant speed, and that is where the card has real teeth: recolor a creature in response to color-specific removal so a Doom Blade or a Red Elemental Blast loses its legal target, or shift a permanent's color mid-combat to dodge or exploit a protection clause. The friction is the rate, not the speed. Four mana to deploy, then two and a tap each activation, means the recolor you most want is the one you can least afford to hold up mana for, even though the artifact is online the turn it resolves. The design reflects an early habit of pricing utility artifacts by the breadth of what they could theoretically do rather than by the cost of doing it in a live game. The space it gestures at (permanent color-changing as a repeatable resource) has been revisited more cleanly since, usually folded onto a creature or a cheaper artifact with a narrower target. Here the trick is real and the window is genuinely there, but the cost to walk through it almost never clears.