Chaos Charm

The Mirage cycle of five charms was Wizards' first serious attempt at the modal instant: one mana, one color, three options stapled together so the card rarely sits dead in hand. The design discipline is that the modes are deliberately small. A single point of damage barely clears a one-toughness creature; destroying a Wall aims at a card type Mirage cared about and almost nothing since does; granting haste is the kind of throwaway upside that makes the card playable rather than powerful. That smallness is the whole governor on the rate. The charm keeps its options broad (against most boards you will have something to do with it) by capping how much any one mode can swing a game, which is exactly the lever later modal cards loosened once the template proved durable. The haste mode is the one that has aged into a genuine combo enabler: stapling instant-speed haste onto a freshly cast creature, turning it into a finisher or a sacrifice-fodder attacker, reads very differently in a deck built to abuse summoning sickness than it did across a 1996 board. The original charm cycle established the shape that every later one (the Apocalypse charms, the modern flexible removal spells that ask you to choose one) inherited: bundle marginal effects, price them cheap, and let the player's read of the board decide which one matters.