Oracle en-Vec

A control spell dressed as a 1/1, and one of the strangest pieces of attack-rights manipulation ever printed. The mechanic does not stop your opponent from attacking; it dictates the terms. You name nothing yourself: the opponent picks which creatures are committed, and those chosen creatures must attack if able while everything else is forbidden from doing so. The trap is the end-step clause: any chosen creature that did not attack gets destroyed. Crucially, "any number" includes zero, so an opponent who reads carefully can simply commit no creatures and walk away clean, taking the turn off rather than risking the punishment. The card only bites when they want to attack and have to figure out which creatures can be committed without one of them getting stranded by a board shift (a committed flier that finds nothing legal to attack, a creature tapped down before combat) and destroyed for failing to swing. Activated only on your own turn, it is a pre-combat tax laid on the opponent's upcoming attack step, turning their offense into a liability they have to navigate rather than a threat you have to block.

What makes it a designer's curiosity is how much decision-making it outsources. The opponent does all the choosing, so the card reads less like removal than a coercive negotiation, and its strength rides entirely on board state: it does nothing into an empty board and folds against creatures that always want to attack anyway. It belongs to Tempest's run of intricate, fiddly white control pieces, built to be read twice and resolved carefully rather than slammed.