Imi Statue

A tax that ignores lands entirely and goes after a narrower target: the deck whose untap step is doing too much. The Winter Orb school of stax slows everyone's mana down by the same amount; this caps the number of artifacts that come back online when the turn rolls over, which bites the player whose mana base is a pile of signets and rocks while the deck with one of them shrugs. The crucial limit is the wording: it governs only the untap step itself, leaving untapped any artifact that comes back online through a spell or activated ability later in the turn. What it actually does is force a choice between which single artifact you most want active each turn, which is brutal for a board built to recur multiple mana sources together and harmless for a board that wasn't. The symmetry is real but lopsided in practice, and that lopsidedness is the whole point: you run it because your own deck doesn't lean on untapping artifacts and your opponent's does. It reads as a hyper-specific hatebox, a product of an era when stax pieces were built as static locks rather than tempo plays, when "untap more than one artifact" described a smaller slice of the format than it later would as artifact-matters strategies multiplied. The design instinct (find the resource an opponent overextends into and quietly cap it) is the same one behind every asymmetric-feeling lock since.