Horn of Deafening

Damage prevention as a recurring tax, and one of the stranger places early Magic went looking for a tempo lever. Rather than fog a turn or blank a single attack, the activation rents a creature's combat damage for two mana, every turn, indefinitely. That makes the artifact a soft lock against any deck whose plan funnels through one threat: the giant trampler, the lone evasive flyer, the singular finisher a slower deck cannot otherwise race. The cost structure is what dates it. Two-and-tap for single-target prevention is a poor rate by modern standards, and the four-mana setup means the lock comes online a turn after the threat has usually already connected once. This sits in a brief window where Wizards treated damage prevention as a full design pillar (Circles of Protection, the whole early prevention suite) before the philosophy shifted toward countering, killing, or racing the threat instead of neutering it. It marks the high-water mark of the rentable-prevention idiom: an effect that asks you to keep paying every turn to keep the problem solved, rather than solving it once. The mechanic largely disappeared from the file, and the cards that survived from this era did so on flavor rather than rate.