Obsianus Golem
A vanilla 4/6 for six exists to set a baseline, not to break one. In early Magic's design vocabulary, the artifact creature slot was understood as colorless body-on-demand for decks of any color, available at a premium: Onulet, Tetravus, and Triskelion at the top, with a long shelf of plain stat-lines underneath. Obsianus Golem sits on that shelf as the toughness-forward option, six mana for a body that comfortably outlasts most of what the format was casting at it. The 4/6 split is the design tell. Power four is the floor for "matters in combat"; toughness six, in that first era, was immune to almost every burn spell and creature around. It was the wall that also hit back, priced at the rate the original design used for "no abilities, no colors, just numbers." Reprinted through the core sets of the 1990s as a deliberately uncomplicated rare, then quietly retired once Wizards stopped pretending six mana for a vanilla artifact creature was a rate anyone would pay. What survives is archaeological interest: this is what the original design team thought a generically-castable threat should cost, before the curve compressed and the artifact-creature slot got handed to cards that actually do something.

Format Status
More formatsFewer formats
Other printings
- Masters Edition IV#218
- Classic Sixth Edition#303
- Fourth Edition Foreign Black Border#339
- Fourth Edition#339
- Summer Magic / Edgar#268
- Revised Edition#268
- Foreign Black Border#268
- Intl. Collectors' Edition#268












