Staff of Zegon

Pay four mana to put it on the battlefield, then three more and a tap each turn you want to use it: that activation cost approaches an entire turn's mana for the privilege of shaving two power off a single creature until end of turn. The rate is brutal even by the standards of its era, and that is the point. This is colorless utility priced as a luxury rather than a baseline, a way for a deck with no access to white removal or black combat tricks to nudge one block-math problem in its favor, once per turn, and be grateful the option existed at all. The -0 toughness clause is the other tell. Modern minus-power effects almost always shave toughness too, because that is where the real leverage lives: a -2/-2 can finish a wounded creature or combine with marked damage to pick off a threat. Locking the debuff to power alone means the Staff can only blunt a creature's offense, never kill it and never trade up. It is a pure attack-stopper, and a slow one. The artifact filled a real gap in 1994 deckbuilding and has been functionally obsolete for decades since, which is its own kind of historical document: a snapshot of what colorless tempo was allowed to cost before the design language learned to be generous.