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Moxonomy

Booby Trap

Artifact6 generic mana

A joke card built around a guessing game, and a clean specimen of the "for the lulz" design school that ran through Tempest-era sets. Six colorless mana buys you a wager: name a card other than a basic land, and if your chosen opponent ever draws it, they take ten to the face. The math runs in the wrong direction. You are paying six mana for an effect entirely contingent on an opponent drawing a specific card, against a card you have to name on sight, with no way to know what is in their deck unless you have already seen it. The honest read is that the artifact is a riddle disguised as removal: it only connects through information you do not normally have access to, which means it lives or dies on shuffle-and-stack manipulation that puts the named card on top of their library. That dependency is the whole design. Strip the contingency away and ten damage for six mana would be unremarkable; bolt the contingency on and the card becomes a puzzle box that asks you to engineer the very draw it punishes. It exists to be solved rather than played, a footnote that rewards the player willing to treat the opponent's library as a thing to be arranged rather than feared.

Booby Trap (psal)
PSAL · #H49rare
Pricing
Normal: $0.38
Foil:
Oracle Text

Rules text

As this artifact enters, choose an opponent and a card name other than a basic land card name. The chosen player reveals each card they draw. When the chosen player draws a card with the chosen name, sacrifice this artifact. If you do, this artifact deals 10 damage to that player.
Legalities

Format Status

Standard
N/A
Pioneer
N/A
Modern
Legal
Legacy
Legal
Vintage
Legal
Commander
Legal
Pauper
N/A
Brawl
N/A
Historic
N/A
Alchemy
N/A
Timeless
N/A
Standard Brawl
N/A
More formats
Old School
N/A
Premodern
Legal
PreDH
Legal
Pauper Commander
N/A
Oathbreaker
Legal
Gladiator
N/A
Penny Dreadful
Legal
Duel Commander
Legal
Future Standard
N/A
COMPETITIVEBRAWL
N/A
TLR
N/A
Printings elsewhere

Other printings

3 sets
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