Flailing Soldier

Both activated abilities are the whole design, and the clause "any player may activate" is the line that turns a plain red body into a negotiation. Most pump effects belong to the controller alone; this one hands both the buff and the debuff to every opponent, which means a 2/2 can be inflated into lethal combat math by the wrong person or whittled away before it ever connects. The two halves are built to cancel: stack a +1/+1 to push damage through, and any opponent with a spare mana can answer with a -1/-1, producing a tug of war over a single creature's size mid-combat. It is a deliberate experiment in shared control, one of several early-era designs that handed opponents access to abilities normally reserved for the owner. The trick rarely pays off the way a clean combat pump does, because the symmetry undercuts any commitment: every mana you sink into making it bigger is one an opponent can match to make it smaller, and the modest body means it can simply die if someone spends two mana to shrink it to zero toughness. What remains is a curiosity from a stretch when designers were probing what happened once the steering wheel got passed around, then sat back to watch what players would do with it.