Land Cap

Part of Ice Age's depletion-land cycle, a family of dual lands built on the most punitive resource-rationing math the era produced. The trick is the depletion counter: tapping it for either color of mana doesn't merely tap the land, it locks it down through your next untap step, because the counter that prevents untapping isn't removed until your following upkeep. The result is a dual that produces white or blue only every other turn. That cadence is the entire design: a land cannot be both color-flexible and always-available without breaking the curve the format was tuned to, so the cycle traded availability away in exchange for two-color access at a time when untapped duals were the scarcest commodity in the game. The depletion mechanic reads as a tempo tax paid in advance, and it never found a deck willing to pay it, because the cost lands at exactly the moment a two-color deck most wants its mana online. The cycle as a whole stands now as a fossil of a particular balancing philosophy: when Wizards didn't yet trust itself to print clean fixing, it priced flexibility in skipped turns rather than damage or life, the way later cycles would. A useful artifact of how cautiously the early game treated lands that did more than one thing.