Ashling's Prerogative

A symmetrical effect that bends almost entirely your way once you build for it. The split between haste and entering-tapped runs along a single axis (odd versus even mana value), which means deck construction quietly resolves the symmetry before the game starts: load your curve onto one parity and the opponent's creatures eat the tap clause while yours hit the ground swinging. The partition is non-obvious in the abstract and trivial in practice. Most decks already cluster their costs; declaring odd or even just reads off whichever half you happened to fill. The tapped-on-entry penalty is the sharper half of the card, since it taxes an opponent's creatures the turn they arrive (no blocking, no attacking, no immediate tap activations), turning a two-mana enchantment into a soft Stasis on the wrong-parity board. It belongs to that small family of designs that hand both players the same rule and trust one of them to have done the homework: the effect is fair only on paper. Haste as the reward and a forced tap as the toll make it a tempo piece first and a build-around second, doing nothing in a vacuum and warping an entire board state the moment its controller has shaped a deck around a chosen number's parity.