Static Orb

A symmetrical prison that asks the deck building it to break the symmetry. The trick is that "two permanents" is a cap, not a freeze: both players still untap, just slowly, which means the card punishes whoever relies on a wide board of lands and creatures while sparing whoever needs little. Stax decks lean on that asymmetry by minimizing their own untap footprint (few lands, mana rocks that produce surplus, effects that win without needing everything online) and watching the opponent strangle on a manabase they can no longer fully turn back on. The drawback baked into the name is the real design discipline: as long as the Orb is untapped, it taxes you too, so the lock has to be lifted at the right moment. The precise line is to tap it during the opponent's turn (their end step is the clean window) so that it sits tapped when your own untap step arrives, freeing all of your permanents while the Orb is offline, then re-engaging once you have untapped. Tap it on your own turn and you have only handed the relief to the opponent. It belongs to the resource-denial artifact family that Winter Orb opened years earlier; where Winter Orb squeezes lands specifically, Static Orb is the blunter cousin, throttling every permanent type at once. Alone it does almost nothing; in a deck constructed to abuse the gap between "needs two untaps" and "needs ten," it does everything.