Safe Haven

A flicker engine printed years before flicker was a deck. The construction is unusual: the land itself stores the creatures, exiling them one at a time at the cost of two mana and a tap, and only releases them all at once when you choose to sacrifice it during upkeep. That makes it less a protection spell and more a battery, charged over several turns and discharged in a single beat. The strategic axis it opens is the upkeep return window: every creature you fed it comes back simultaneously, retriggering whatever fires when those creatures enter, which turns a defensive blink into a mass enters-the-battlefield payoff. The friction that keeps the card honest is the sacrifice clause. You cannot return the creatures and keep the land too; cashing in the stored value means destroying the engine, so the card forces a one-time choice between board safety and board explosion. For an early-design land asked to do something this open-ended, the cost structure is doing real balancing work: two mana per exile makes building the battery slow, and the all-or-nothing return prevents it from becoming a recurring loop. It is a primitive, but a legible one, sketching the design logic that later blink cards would refine into a whole archetype.