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Moxonomy

Controlled Instincts

Enchantment — AuraBlue mana

Color-hosed Paralyze, narrowed to two enemies. The enchantment-as-soft-removal lineage runs back to cards like Pacifism, but this one buys its one-mana rate by refusing to point anywhere except red or green creatures. That restriction is the whole transaction. The aura does not tap the creature on entry, nor does it remove it from the battlefield; it simply denies the untap step indefinitely. So the timing is the whole game: cast it while the target is already tapped (after it attacks, after it activates a tap ability) and the creature stays locked out of every future untap step, a permanent that can neither attack nor block until something else intervenes. Cast it on an untapped creature and it can still attack once, after which it stays tapped for good; it can also block all day, since declaring a blocker never taps it. Against the cheap, fast threats blue most wanted help against (red aggro and green stompy), the right window turns this into near-Pacifism for a single mana. Against everything else it is a dead card. The design is a sideboard answer wearing a maindeck enchantment's clothes: priced to be an unconditional blank against the wrong opponent, and priced just as deliberately to be a near-lock against the right one. It belongs to a school of color-pie enforcement that has largely fallen out of fashion, where developers asymmetrically punished specific color pairings rather than printing flexible answers and trusting players to slot them. Read as a piece of that older philosophy, the narrow target line is not a weakness to apologize for; it is the entire reason the rate exists.

Controlled Instincts (con)
CON · #23uncommon
Pricing
Normal: $0.07
Foil: $0.19
Oracle Text

Rules text

Enchant red or green creature Enchanted creature doesn't untap during its controller's untap step.
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
N/A
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
Legal
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