Ifh-Bíff Efreet

Richard Garfield's group-shooter, and one of the cleanest expressions of a design philosophy Magic largely abandoned: the symmetric political weapon. The activation cost is a single green mana, the damage is split across every flier and every player including its controller, and the activation is open to the table. That last clause is the load-bearing one. Any opponent can pay green to fire it, which turns the Efreet into a shared resource: a permanent that punishes the board state rather than serving one player's plan. The pingers of the era (Prodigal Sorcerer, Orcish Artillery) were directional; this one points everywhere at once and invites the table to push the button. The flier-specific damage makes it a soft answer to the air war of its day, while the damage-to-each-player clause prices the use against a life total that erodes every time the gun fires. Modern design has retreated from this kind of effect because symmetric repeatable damage is a headache in multiplayer and a stalemate-breaker in duels, but the card remains the textbook example of how to build a creature whose ability belongs to the format, not the controller. The 3/3 flying body for four mana is almost an afterthought: respectable green air for 1993, but the rules text is the entire reason the card is remembered.