Thran Weaponry

The pump effect here is permanent in a way most anthems are not: once you tap it, every creature stays at +2/+2 until the artifact untaps, and the second line of text exists specifically to let you keep it tapped forever. That is the whole design. You spend the activation cost once, decline to untap, and the bonus is locked in across your turns and your opponents' alike, a symmetric global buff you choose never to surrender. The tap in the activation cost is what makes this a one-time commitment rather than a repeatable engine: you cannot pay it again while the artifact is already tapped, so the standard line is to fire it once, refuse the untap, and treat a tapped artifact as a static enchantment you assembled out of an activated ability. Echo is the friction that pays for it: the artifact costs four to deploy and four again on your next upkeep, so the buff is not free, just front-loaded into a commitment. The symmetry is the catch and the point. Both players' boards swell, which favors whoever has the wider battlefield or the better way to convert size into reach, so the card rewards being ahead on creatures rather than being a generic accelerant. It is a curiosity of the late-90s artifact era, when "you may choose not to untap" was a real design lever and pump effects were still being explored at the team-wide scale.