Barbed Foliage

A defensive enchantment built around a keyword its own set introduced: flanking, the ability where a blocking creature without flanking takes a power penalty in combat. This one inverts the relationship by stripping flanking off any creature that attacks you, then pinging the grounded attackers for a point on top. The design is a deliberate counter to the aggressive flanking creatures that defined its era's combat math, the Cavalry and knights that wanted to swing in profitably; against them, this turns the attack step into a tax. The fixation on flanking is also what dates it most sharply. It is a punishment card aimed at a single mechanic that never became evergreen, so the first ability does nothing against anything that was never going to have flanking in the first place, and the second only reaches creatures kept on the ground. What you get is a card whose ceiling is entirely contextual: it reads as a sweeping deterrent and functions as a narrow one, asymmetric in your favor but only when the opponent's board happens to match the template it was drawn to answer. It belongs to the moment Magic was still building rules text around keywords it would later abandon, a design carved to punish a combat ability that the game's wider machinery never came back to support.