Crown of Empires

Pay the activation cost and tap a creature, and you have an Icy Manipulator effect bolted onto an artifact: it stalls an attacker or a blocker for a turn, useful and forgettable, the kind of piece that fills out a shell and never headlines one. The conditional theft clause is why anyone bothers. Assemble the full set (Throne of Empires and Scepter of Empires both on the battlefield) and that tap becomes a permanent steal: every turn, at instant speed, the targeted creature changes hands and stays yours. This is one corner of a three-card jigsaw, a reward structure built around committing to a trio of otherwise mediocre artifacts. Each piece is deliberately undertuned alone so that the payoff for collecting all three can run lopsided without warping anything: the Throne builds an army of soldiers scaled to how many of the set you control, the Scepter drains and gains life on the same scaling, and this one converts opposing creatures into your own. The tax is the gimmick's price: holding three slots open for artifacts that each do little until the others arrive is steep, and the reward, while real, asks you to survive long enough to pay it. It is a puzzle-box payoff built before set-based mechanics would later formalize the idea of rewarding a collected group, and the individual pieces wear their incompleteness honestly.