Desert's Hold

The Pacifism template, taxed for a benefit and rewarded for a theme. Stripping a creature of attack and block goes back to the earliest sets, and the line of Auras built on that effect (Pacifism, Arrest, Faith's Fetters) has always been about how much extra you bolt onto the lockdown for the mana. This one widens the lock past combat: shutting off activated abilities turns it from a fog on a beater into a hard answer for the creature that wins through its tap ability, its sacrifice outlet, its mana sink. That clause is the real difference between this and a plain attack-block Aura; it answers a creature whose threat was never going to swing at you anyway. The lifegain rider is conditional and intentionally cheap to satisfy, a nudge toward a land-typed graveyard rather than a payoff worth building around: three life that costs you nothing if the deck was already going to run the right lands. The result is a removal-adjacent Aura that asks one small deckbuilding question (do you control or have buried the right land type?) and pays a modest tax on the answer. Take that question away and you are left with a fine, unglamorous control piece in the Arrest tradition.