Flailing Manticore

Both activated abilities end with the same permission slip: anyone at the table can pay the mana, not just the controller. That clause inverts the usual logic of a creature's stats. Normally a body is private property; here the 3/3 flying first-striker is a public ledger anyone can edit, in either direction, for a single mana per swing. Your opponent can grind it down toward a -1/-1 death, you can buy it back up, and the creature's fate becomes a bidding war settled by whoever is willing to sink more land into the question. The flier is a real threat, but you never fully own it, because the off switch is bolted to the outside of the box where everyone can reach it. This sits in a short-lived design vein that flirted with making a creature's toughness a communal resource rather than a controller's asset, distributing activated costs to the whole table. The idea never took root: designers eventually decided that opponent-usable abilities generate more rules confusion than genuine tension, and the family was quietly retired. What remains is one of the cleaner attempts in that experiment, a beater that comes with its own self-destruct button and hands every player a finger to press it.