Ring of Immortals

One of the earliest attempts at protection-as-permanent: a repeatable shield that only fires when an instant or Aura targets something you already control. The narrow targeting is the lever that holds the rate down. It will not stop a sweeper, it will not stop a discard spell, it will not stop a creature being cast; it answers only the slice of interaction aimed directly at your board. In an era when many of the scariest threats arrived as Auras (Control Magic and the various enchant-creature steals and shrinks), that slice mattered more than it would later, but it was always a slice: the card is structurally a tax on a specific kind of removal, not an answer to a game plan. The price tag reflects that uncertainty. Eight mana of total investment to net a single counter (five to cast, then three plus the tap to activate) is the cost of a 1994 design that did not yet trust repeatable counterspells to be cheap. Because it is a noncreature artifact, it suffers no summoning sickness and can protect itself the turn it lands if the three activation mana is available, but that floor is the ceiling too. A historical artifact in the literal sense: the seed of an evergreen design space (protect-your-stuff permanents) priced for a format that no longer exists, and a reminder of how long the game took to learn that a recurring effect has to be cheap at the activation, not just narrow in its targeting, to earn its slot.