Portcullis

A board-state lock that punishes the third creature rather than the first, which is the design conceit that makes it strange and durable. The first two creatures resolve normally; everything after that gets exiled, held in a kind of suspended animation until the artifact leaves the battlefield, at which point the whole backlog floods back in at once. That return clause is the load-bearing detail: this is not a removal spell so much as a stasis valve, and breaking it open is its own resource. The exiled creatures are tied to the artifact's life, so the controller who deploys it is buying a frozen battlefield on the condition that they keep the lock standing. It reads as symmetrical but plays asymmetrically, since the threshold counts every creature on the battlefield, not just yours: the player who lands the most bodies before it resolves keeps a board, and everyone else is locked out of deploying so long as two creatures stand. The "enters" trigger means it ignores how a creature arrives (cast, reanimated, tokened, blinked), so two opposing bodies alone can shut your own deployment down. It came out of a Tempest-block strain of control artifacts built to warp combat math rather than trade one-for-one, and its mechanism (delayed mass return on a single permanent leaving play) has stayed unusual enough that it remains a puzzle box: a card you build a game plan around, not a card you slot into one.