Sunglasses of Urza

Three generic mana buys a permanent that does exactly one thing: lets you spend white mana as though it were red, in that direction only, with no body, no ramp, and no second use. This is the design vocabulary of a set that thought Plains-and-Mountain decks would want a dedicated, enchantment-style color-bridge rather than a land or a rock. The card reads today as a museum piece for how early Magic conceived of color identity as a hard wall that needed purpose-built artifacts to punch through, rather than as a deckbuilding cost paid in the manabase. Modern fixing folds mana production and color conversion into the same permanent (any dual land, any signet, any talisman), which makes the Sunglasses look absurdly overpriced for what little they do. The flavor is the whole point: Urza in shades so that white mana reads to him as red, a literal-minded gag of the kind early Magic ran on. The card has survived in the cultural memory of the game almost entirely on the strength of its name and its art, not on anything it ever accomplished on a battlefield.