Chariot of the Sun

A pump artifact built backwards: it grants evasion while making the creature easier to kill, rewriting base toughness to 1 in exchange for flying. The activated cost is real (two mana on top of the artifact's investment), and the trade-off is the whole design. Most flying-granters of the era simply added a keyword; this one attaches a clause that reads like a drawback but can function as a tool. The "you control" restriction is what fixes its lane: you can only point it at your own creatures, so the toughness rewrite is never a way to soften an opposing blocker or set up burn-and-trample math against a defender. It stays an evasion enabler with a built-in liability rather than a removal piece. Setting base toughness to 1 cuts the wrong way most of the time (it shrinks your own attacker into the range of any stray ping), so the pilot's job is to find the narrow spot where a one-toughness flier in the air is worth more than a sturdier body on the ground. The card never found a defining home, but the base-toughness rewrite is the interesting bit: it treats a creature's toughness as a value to be overwritten rather than a number to be added to, an early instance of Wizards using stat-setting as a knob long before toughness-matters interactions were a deliberate theme.