Joven's Tools

The math tells the whole story: ten total mana to make one creature unblockable for one turn, and only mostly unblockable at that, since any Wall on the other side still stops it cold. This is evasion at a price almost nobody was willing to pay, and it reads now as an artifact of the era's deep suspicion of unconditional effects. The clause that exempts Walls is the tell. In the early sets, Walls were the default defensive creature, the thing a beginner's deck threw in front of attackers, so a "can't be blocked except by Walls" rider was the cautious designer's way of granting evasion while leaving the most common blocker as an out. The result is a colorless evasion engine that demanded ten total mana to point at a single attacker, in a set already remembered for cards that hovered well below the curve. The card belongs to a moment in design before evasion was understood as something you bake into a creature's cost rather than rent at a premium from a separate artifact: the same job that later got done for a single mana on a creature's own line here cost a six-mana rock and four more to activate, with a built-in escape hatch for the defender.