Gauntlet of Might
A single anthem stapled to a mana doubler, and both halves are symmetrical in a way early Magic extended freely: the +1/+1 reaches every red creature on the battlefield, and the doubling clause fires whenever any Mountain is tapped for mana, not just yours. Each effect should arguably have been a card on its own. A static +1/+1 to an entire color is the kind of pump later sets would gate behind a creature type (Lord of Atlantis, Goblin King) or a tribal restriction, and the Mountain-doubling clause is functionally the red half of what Mana Flare and later Caged Sun split across separate printings. Bolting both onto one four-mana artifact, with no tribal limiter, is a generosity the design discipline of the time simply had not learned to fear.
The card has spent most of its life on the Reserved List, which froze it as an Alpha-Beta-Unlimited artifact and turned every conversation about it into a conversation about scarcity rather than play. Functionally, it is the ancestor every mono-red ramp-and-beatdown build gets measured against: the rate is absurd by modern standards, and the symmetry it does carry is the kind early Magic treated as a fair trade rather than a real cost, on the assumption that a red-heavy board would always exploit a Mountain doubler harder than the opponent could.








