Glittering Lynx

Damage prevention printed as a default state, with the twist that the off-switch belongs to everyone. The Cat shrugs off all damage by rule, so blocking it or burning it accomplishes nothing until somebody pays two mana to peel the shield away, and the design hands that activation to "any player." That last clause is the whole point: an opponent can spend their own mana to make your creature mortal for a turn, then attack into it or shoot it down. It turns a static prevention effect into a negotiation over who is willing to pay the tax and when. The era it comes from kept handing costs and abilities to the wrong side of the table, defenses an opponent could dismantle for a fee, rewards bought at a price. As a body the rate is a footnote; the interest is the open-activation template, an early experiment in shared control over a permanent's text. The cost to remove the protection is modest enough that the prevention is rarely a true wall, but the friction matters: an opponent has to commit mana to burn or fight through it, and a tapped-out opponent simply cannot strip the shield to deal it damage. It is a small, strange design that kept asking who gets to push the button, and one of the cleaner illustrations of how a single "any player may" clause reshapes what a static ability is actually worth.