Willow Satyr

Stealing legendary creatures was a Legends preoccupation: the set introduced the legendary type and immediately printed cards that asked what theft might mean against it. The mechanical idea here is the tap-lock control transfer, the same engine Old Man of the Sea runs on, retuned for green and aimed exclusively at legends. Everything hinges on the "may choose not to untap" clause: the controller voluntarily keeps the satyr tapped to maintain the lock, turning a 1/1 into a permanent leash on the opponent's best creature, at the cost of never attacking or blocking with it again. The target pool is where the card shows its age. In 1994 the legendary type was rare enough that a four-mana answer keyed to it was a curiosity, a hate card for a metagame that did not yet exist. The legend rule was different then too: two copies of the same legend destroyed each other, so stealing one had a second use as a removal enabler if you happened to share a name. What time has done to this card is mostly about its target pool. The set of legendary creatures is now enormous, the format that cares most about them is built around a single legend in the command zone, and a green tap-lock on that one creature reads very differently than a tap-lock on whatever legend happened to be on the table in 1994.