Zerapa Minotaur

Combat first strike normally lets the attacker dictate the exchange, but here the keyword sits on a public switch: for two generic mana, any player (including the one staring down the attack) can shut it off until end of turn. That inversion is the design oddity. A blocker who wants to flatten a one-sided beat into a mutual trade simply pays to remove the first strike, buying the favorable combat math at a price that scales with how badly the trade is wanted. The 3/3 body is genuinely sharp on offense and genuinely exposed the moment defense decides to spend, a combat reliability permanently up for auction. This belongs to a brief early-era experiment with "any player may activate" valves, abilities that handed shared control of a permanent to the whole table. Wizards has mostly retired the idea: it muddies who is actually piloting a board state and invites open-ended, politically awkward bargaining. The rate holds up fine, but the mechanic is the reason to look twice, a snapshot of a moment when the game flirted with letting opponents reach across the table and flip your switches before deciding players preferred to keep their own abilities to themselves.