Part Water

Evasion sold by the unit, scaling with how much mana you sink into a single casting: that is the stranger idea at work here. Most islandwalk grants in Magic's first decade were stapled to a single creature, a merfolk lord, or a land-type changer; this one decouples the keyword entirely and prices it per attacker. The result is a finisher disguised as a trick: against an opponent with Islands it is a one-card alpha strike, and against anyone without them it is dead. That binary is the cost of the design, and it is why the grant is metered the way it is rather than something gentler. The doubled X is the real tell: rather than charging one mana per creature, the era's designers priced each unblockable attacker at two mana on top of the floor, so buys three attackers and buys five, a straight linear ramp of two mana per body. That curve reads as steep now, but it reflects a moment when blue's claim to "unblockable" was treated as a premium worth charging for. A flavor-first sorcery from an era that built whole cards around a single keyword interaction, preserved mostly as a curiosity of how cautiously the early game metered its evasion: one creature, one casting, at full retail.