Orb of Origin

Somewhere along the way a designer decided the game needed a supertype vocabulary it does not have, and built the whole gag around typography: "poly" and "mono" are set in the same register as real supertypes, so at a glance the card reads like a serious erratum to how artifacts work. The mechanic it invents does two things at once. It taxes every other noncreature artifact on the battlefield, bolting an extra tap onto abilities that did not already require one, which quietly shuts off the whole class of untapped mana-rock loops and free-activation combos that make artifacts abusable. And it introduces "continuous," a state where a tapped artifact simply stops having abilities, so tapping something becomes a way to silence it rather than a cost you pay to use it. The Orb exempts itself (it is the singular poly artifact), which is why its own ability stays clean at two mana for any color. Reading the reminder text is the entire experience: it asks you to hold a made-up type system in your head long enough to realize the design is coherent, if pointless. What lifts it above a pure gag is that it works exactly as written, a fully specified rules subsystem that governs a battlefield it shares with every other artifact in the game, friend and foe alike, while contributing almost nothing to it.