Metal Fatigue

A hate card aimed at a metagame made of metal, built for an era when artifact aggression and artifact ramp were dense enough to deserve a hard answer rather than a flexible one. Tapping every artifact at instant speed neutralizes a turn of an affinity-style assault, locks the mana out of an artifact-fueled ramp engine, and shuts off activated abilities whose sources need to be untapped. The catch is right there in the symmetry: the effect taps all artifacts, including yours, with no exception clause, so it only earns its keep when one side of the board is overwhelmingly more artifact-dependent than the other. That is a brutally narrow window. Strip away a format saturated with cheap artifacts and the card reads as a blank, the kind of single-purpose answer that solves one archetype completely and sits dead the rest of the time. The instant timing is the lone thing keeping it sharp: held up, it ambushes the attack step rather than waiting a turn, the difference between a tempo blowout and a polite request that the opponent attack later. Note what it is not. It does not prevent anything from untapping next turn, so the lock lasts exactly one cycle; the opponent's metal wakes up on their untap step, and you have bought one window, not a stranglehold.