Serrated Arrows

A rare bright spot in a set famous for being thin, this is the card Homelands is best remembered for. The design is a charge-counter resource engine before charge counters had a name: three arrowhead counters, each spent to shrink a creature by permanently stapling a -1/-1 counter to it, and a self-sacrifice clause that retires the artifact once the ammunition runs dry. The -1/-1 counters are the part that makes it more than slow removal: they stick. Shrink a creature's toughness to zero and it dies outright; otherwise the damage is structural rather than the kind of combat or burn damage that wears off at end of turn. Three activations is a lot of attrition for a single permanent, and the tap cost usually rations the output to one counter per turn absent an untap effect. The self-sacrifice line is the elegant touch, a built-in clock that prevents the empty artifact from lingering as a dead permanent. It became a benchmark for repeatable -1/-1 removal, the rate later printings circled at higher cost or with extra restrictions. For a set whose reputation never recovered, this is the one card that aged into respect rather than punchline.