Staff of the Ages

A hate piece before the format had a vocabulary for them, aimed at exactly one thing: the unblockability that landwalk grants. Early sets leaned hard on landwalk as evasion, with islandwalk, swampwalk, and the rest turning a creature into reliable damage whenever the defender ran the matching basic, and there was almost nothing a color-light deck could do about it. This artifact answers that whole category in one cheap, colorless slot, switching off every landwalker on the board at once rather than removing any single threat. The design instinct is sound and surprisingly modern: meet a board-state ability with a static rule change instead of a spell, so the answer keeps working turn after turn without re-investment. The catch is that it is an answer to a problem that mattered most in the era that printed it. As landwalk receded from the evasion toolkit and dedicated walkers stopped showing up as a deck's win condition, the universe of things this turns off shrank toward zero. The residue is a clean, almost academic piece of design: a permanent that does nothing to your own plan and everything to a single mechanic, the kind of narrow-but-total answer that later design would package into a removable sideboard slot rather than a maindeck artifact.