Shield of the Ages

Two generic mana for one prevented point, repeatable as long as your mana lasts: that pricing tells you everything about how the game's early designers thought about damage math. Each life saved costs more than the life itself is worth in nearly any deck that would run it, because the prevention here is metered out a single pip at a time rather than bought in meaningful chunks. The artifact belongs to a wave of cards whose abilities read as flexible (no cap, repeatable, no conditions) and turn out unusable, gated behind grinding per-activation costs instead of tight one-shot rates. The model never produced a card worth a slot, and the prevention design that followed walked away from it: fixed-cost shields that stop a worthwhile amount at once, or triggers tied to creatures and combat. As a marker of where protection sat before that compression, it stands as evidence of how steeply the rate on staying alive has fallen since.