Snowfall

A mana fixer for one of the most punishing taxes in early Magic. Cumulative upkeep was the set's signature drag, a cost that grew by one each turn until it strangled whatever it was attached to, and Snowfall exists to feed it: every Island tapped for mana throws off extra blue earmarked for cumulative upkeep, with snow Islands doubling the dividend to reward a deliberately frozen manabase. The earmark is the whole design. The mana it produces cannot buy spells, cannot ramp into threats, and cannot interact; it can only service cumulative upkeep costs across the board, which makes Snowfall an enabler rather than a payoff. The intended partners are the other expensive-to-sustain permanents of the era, the Glacial Chasms and the long-lived cumulative-upkeep enchantments whose value compounds only if you can keep affording them; Snowfall turns your lands into a dedicated fund for outlasting that growing tax. The trap is that it pays its own upkeep too, so a chunk of the engine's output loops back into keeping the engine alive, and a player who builds nothing else around it has bought a permanent that does little but tread water. As a piece of Ice Age design it reads as a study in earmarked mana: a resource generator deliberately walled off from everything but the narrow task it was built for, useful precisely to the degree that you have stacked your deck with the costs it exists to pay.