Iceberg

A mana battery dressed as a snowdrift, and one of the earliest enchantments to treat counters as stored resource rather than a status track. The deal is straightforward in shape but punishing in tempo: you front-load mana on the turn you cast it, paying to bank X charges, the counters then sit frozen on the board until you spend them, and every counter pulled out comes back as a single colorless. Refilling costs three mana per counter, so the battery is meant to be drained, not topped off. That makes Iceberg a deliberate gamble against the clock, a way to convert a chunk of mana now into a delayed burst later for an expensive payoff. The friction is everywhere by design: it stores generic colorless rather than blue, so it does not enable the blue spells that would normally want a mana cushion; it taps nothing on its own; and the recharge rate is steep enough that nobody profits from cycling it. The cost structure compounds the patience the card asks for, since loading it with any counters at all means committing at least three mana on the turn you cast it, with no return until you start thawing. It comes from a generation of board-bound permanents that paid out only over a long arc, and few took the impulse this far: its entire value is the mana you chose to freeze and how cleverly you choose to release it.