Iron Lance

The economics here never add up. Spending three mana and a tap to grant first strike for a turn is a worse rate than any first-strike body printed before or since, and it doesn't even commit a creature to the board. The repeatable angle is the only thing the card has going for it: as a permanent on the table, it can dress a different attacker or blocker in first strike every turn, turning each combat into a question the opponent has to answer fresh. The problem is that the answer is usually cheap. A single instant-speed removal spell on the chosen creature wastes the whole investment, and the ability does nothing to protect the artifact or the body it's pumping. Mercadian Masques was a set full of these slow, repeatable utility artifacts built around the rebel and mercenary fetch engines, and Iron Lance fits the era's appetite for incremental, mana-hungry combat math rather than the burst the keyword would later get baked into creatures for free. It is a clean illustration of why granted-keyword artifacts mostly fell out of fashion: the rate to rent an ability turn by turn rarely beats the rate to just print it on a creature once.