Pygmy Hippo

A Rube Goldberg machine in creature form, and one of the strangest pieces of mana-denial design ever printed. The premise is the kind of thing only mid-90s R&D would attempt: connect with an unblocked attacker and you get to forcibly tap out your opponent, draining their lands of mana that they then lose, in exchange for forfeiting this turn's combat damage. The defending player burns their resources for nothing, and you collect colorless mana equal to what they lost on your next main phase this turn. It is a tax instrument wearing a 2/2 body, trading the damage step for tempo theft and a mana refund. The self-limiting machinery is everywhere: the trigger only fires when unblocked, so a single chump shuts it off; the damage is surrendered every time you use it, so it never actually closes a game; and the timing language has been so heavily reworked over the years that the card barely resembles its original wording. The result reads more like a logic puzzle than a threat, the sort of intricate, half-functional design that the modern templating discipline would never let through. It is one of a handful of cards built around making the opponent activate their own mana abilities, and few do it with this much elaborate, self-defeating apparatus.