Scarecrow

A monument to early-design literalism: the scarecrow that scares crows, rendered as rules text with the flavor logic followed all the way down. A 2/2 artifact body for five mana arrives, then asks for six more and a tap to do the only thing a scarecrow is for, keeping flying creatures from pecking at you. The math is the joke and the problem in one: the six-mana activation costs more than most of the flyers it would blank, and the prevention is doubly narrow, covering only damage to you (not your other creatures or planeswalkers) and only from creatures with flying. This is design from the era before development learned to price defensive abilities against the boards they were meant to stop, when a card could be built entirely around a single thematic premise and shipped without anyone asking whether the rate was reachable in a real game. The fog-style prevention is gated behind an activation cost that exceeds the casting cost of nearly everything it would want to stop. What it preserves is a record of how literal-minded a creature could be in the game's first years: a 2/2 artifact whose entire purpose is a flavor pun about birds, encoded as a prevention shield that almost no board state ever justified paying for.