Golgothian Sylex

A weapon aimed at a single expansion, and one of the strangest design objects Wizards has ever printed. The activation is a referendum on Antiquities itself: tap, pay a mana, and every nontoken permanent whose name first appeared in that set is sacrificed by its controller, regardless of who that controller is or what the permanent cost. The "sacrificed" wording matters: it slips past indestructibility and hits things destruction never could, while leaving tokens and anything printed elsewhere untouched. That sacrifice list includes the Sylex's own targets of intent (the Urza lands, the Mishra artifacts, the broken mana rocks of the era) and, by the rule that it cares about the original printing, the Sylex itself. The card is a self-consuming reset button scoped to a single product, something the modern design philosophy would never sign off on: it bakes a specific commercial release into the rules text forever. It is also the rare piece of in-game machinery tied to the Brothers' War in mechanical terms rather than flavor terms, the literal artifact that ends the conflict in the story and the literal artifact that sweeps the conflict's cards off the battlefield in play. Later sets have done set-referential effects through creature types, mechanics, or named characters; naming an expansion in oracle text and letting that list calcify as the set ages is a thing the Sylex did and almost nothing since has dared repeat. Its scope is fixed to a moment of publishing history, not to any board state.