Juntu Stakes

Mana dorks, weenies, and an entire substratum of small utility creatures share a property the rest of the board does not care about: their power sits at the very bottom of the curve. This colorless soft-lock turns that into a liability. Tap a Llanowar Elves for mana and it stays tapped; swing with a horde of one-power tokens and they cannot block back the next turn. The design is a hate card aimed at a whole texture of play rather than any single deck, and its cleverness is that it discriminates by stat rather than by type or color. It will not stop a 4/4, but it grinds the gears of mana acceleration, chump-blocker armies, and the small evasive creatures that quietly do a deck's work. The catch is a symmetry the card never resolves: it shuts down your own dorks and tokens just as readily, so it rewards a controller whose own creatures sit above the power-1 line. Because the lock lives on a permanent as a static effect, it persists until the artifact is answered, taxing every untap step rather than firing once and fading like a sweeper. This is surgical, era-appropriate design from a period that printed plenty of these targeted artifacts: an effect that does almost nothing against half the decks it sees and quietly dismantles the other half.