City in a Bottle
The original hoser, and the template every set-hate artifact after it took as a reference point. It is itself an Arabian Nights card (the word "other" in the first clause exempts it from its own sweep), aimed squarely at the expansion that printed it: a power level that included Library of Alexandria, Juzám Djinn, and a clutch of early broken rates had begun to warp competitive play, and this was the format's pressure valve. The design is brutally simple and brutally complete: a two-mana artifact that clears the battlefield of an entire expansion's other nontoken permanents, then locks their owners out of casting more. No targeting, no per-card cost; the set itself is the answer. The sweep is a state trigger written with "Whenever," so it does go on the stack and can be responded to, but that window is cold comfort once the second clause has slammed the door on rebuilding.
What makes the card historically load-bearing is the precedent it set. The named-expansion hoser became a recurring tool: Golgothian Sylex pointed at Antiquities, Apocalypse Chime at Homelands. None committed as hard as this one did, because none needed to; the lesson Wizards took was that a whole-set kill switch is a hammer you reach for once and then redesign around. The card is also a curiosity of templating history, its oracle text rewritten repeatedly to handle reprints whose names originally appeared in Arabian Nights, an edge case the original designers never imagined would matter.
