Forbidden Lore

Putting a creature-pump ability onto a land was, in 1995, an idea worth trying: the buff lives on a permanent that shrugs off sweepers and creature removal rather than riding on the attacker itself. The enchanted land gains a tap ability granting one creature +2/+1, and that same design instinct (an activated ability that affects creatures but sits on an Aura attached to a noncreature permanent) runs through the rest of Ice Age's land-enchantment cycle. The friction is deliberate for the era: tapping the land for the pump means choosing each turn between making mana and making a combat swing, and the tap caps the effect at a single creature per turn rather than letting you sink mana into a lethal firebreather. One small upside: the granted ability ignores summoning sickness, so a land can tap for it the moment the Aura resolves, even a land you played that turn. The math never paid off. You invest three mana for an engine that yields a marginal pump on each combat step while taxing a land that would rather produce mana, which is a steep ask for a once-per-turn nudge. It survives now as a clear specimen of mid-90s design philosophy, when a permanent that accrued value slowly was considered a fair trade for being both slow and narrow.