Giant Albatross

A defensive trap dressed as a flier. The body is a small evasive flier, but the design lives entirely in the death trigger, which turns the bird into a deterrent against anything that deals it damage. Trade it away and you invite a tax: every creature that dealt it damage that turn faces destruction unless its controller bleeds 2 life, and the no-regeneration clause closes the era-appropriate escape hatch. The structural friction is the cost itself. The trigger is optional and demands an additional as it resolves, after the creature is already dead, so the full sequence runs to four mana in total: the two to deploy the albatross, then two more held up to fire the punishment once it dies. The payoff lands only when you have kept that mana available against an opponent who took the bait. That double gate (pay to fire, then make them pay to survive) is what keeps the effect from being oppressive; it asks for real resource commitment at exactly the moment you have lost a creature. As a piece of mid-90s blue, it reads as an attempt to give the color a combat-relevant punisher without handing it a removal spell outright, the damage having to route through the albatross's own death rather than through a targeted effect. The mechanics are clever for the period; the rate, like much of its origin set, never found a home, and the card is remembered more as a curiosity of blue's early experiments with combat math than as anything that shaped a format.