#skullclamp

Skullclamp

The mind is a beautiful bounty encased in an annoying bone container.

Skullclamp

The mind is a beautiful bounty encased in an annoying bone container.

Skullclamp (Darksteel) - Luca Zontini

What does it mean to be iconic? I think it's pretty simple - it's whatever you think of first. This is to be independent of any particular format - so for example Sol Ring's overwhelming popularity in Commander doesn't make it an automatic winner. These will not be controversial opinions, I just want to talk about them.

White: Wrath of God

White is the color of fairness, and what's more fair than the equality of the grave? The transition from regeneration to "indestructible until end of turn" as protection against board wipes has robbed Wrath of God of some of its power, but it's still the standard for mass destruction effects.

Runner up: Swords to Plowshares - Pinpoint removal, with due compensation paid to the owner of the removed creature. Fairness in a different form, even if it's too efficient to be printed today.

Blue: Counterspell

"Counter target spell." Or, even more succinctly: "No". Blue is the color of magic itself, and no spell demonstrates that more than Counterspell. As with Wrath of God and board wipes, Counterspell is the standard against which all countermagic is judged. Nearly every set gets a Cancel - "Counter target spell" plus some set-specific upside, costing one and two blue. When it comes to simplicity and efficiency (and ignoring the broken Mana Drain) Counterspell is the go-to way to make your objections known.

Runner up: Ancestral Recall. Blue is the color of knowledge, and Ancestral Recall is what happens when that is taken too far.

Black: Vampiric Tutor

Black is the color that can get anything it want... for a price. Every color has some ability to search the library for one mana, but only Black can get anything it wants and be guaranteed to keep it. In exchange, it costs more than mana - you also pay in life. Between the functionality and the flavor, nothing so simply demonstrates the essence of Black.

Runner up: Necropotence. When you discard the simplicty of Vampiric Tutor, this is what you get: As much life as you wish to spend, for as many cards as you need - and one of the most busted cards in all of Magic.

Red: Lightning Bolt

"Lightning Bolt deals 3 damage to any target." One sentence, eight words, infinite possibility. What could represent Red better than mana for damage? As of March of the Machine, there are four things Lightning Bolt can target: Creatures, Planeswalkers, Battles, and Players. Anyone who thinks Red is all about chaos and smashing rocks together is invited to consider the subtleties of Lightning Bolt. Turn one, bolt their Birds of Paradise - it puts back their whole strategy. You chump blocked their 7/4 - it has one damage marked on it - finish it off with a bolt. Lightning Bolt to the face when they have 20 life - a waste. The same thing at 3 - that's the game. Do they have a huge field of blockers, but you want to take down some 'walkers or battles? Bolt! Did you block something that would die, but they pumped with Giant Growth? Bolt in response! Lightning Bolt might be the best-designed spell in Magic, and the better you get at the game the more you can do with it.

A note on the flavor text: For a long time, Wizards stopped reprinting Lightning Bolt due to concerns that it was too powerful. When it did return, they gave it the flavor text you can see above in reference to that delay. Today it is considered too powerful for Standard, but does show up in supplemental sets.

Runner up: Wheel of Fortune: OK but red *is* still about chaos.

Green: Llanowar Elves

Green is the color of creatures. Green is the color of growth. Elf is the characteristic creature type of Green. Llanowar Elves is an Elf creature that makes your mana grow. It's really that simple! Llanowar Elves is so fundamentally Green that they printed two functionally identical cards (Elvish Mystic and Fyndhorn Elves) due to needing the effect with different flavor.

Runner up: Giant Growth. This was very close. Giant Growth or some variation of it is printed in virtually every magic set. It represents the essence of Green in a different way, by making a statement that for one green mana, my creatures will beat yours.

Colorless: Skullclamp

This was tricky. Colorless, by definition, doesn't really have an identity of its own. An artifact can do almost anything, but shouldn't do things too efficiently or it would be able to undermine the weaknesses of the colors. Skullclamp was first printed in the Mirrodin block, while design was using Equipment for the first time. They looked at a card for one mana that was making a creature stronger and decided no, that's too good. Let's make it a tradeoff by reducing toughness. As a result, if you equip Skullclamp to a one toughness creature it dies instantly and you draw two cards. Oops, we created one of the most efficient card advantage pieces in the game's history and made it available to every color. By any standard, Skullclamp is a design mistake, but it represents exactly why and how artifacts and colorless cards in general can be so powerful, and so dangerous.

Runner up: Black Lotus. It's probably the most iconic Magic card, but one doesn't necessarily think of it in the same category as other colorless cards. It sorta exists in a category of its own. I put it here anyway, to recognize its overall impact.

Land (without a basic land type): Strip Mine

I decided to specify lands without basic land types because otherwise the answer would be the basic lands and if it was just nonbasic lands the answer would be the ABU duals. That's boring, so let's look at utility lands.

The only true identity lands have is "produce mana" (there are a few lands that don't produce mana on their own, but they don't print new ones). Strip Mine is one of the first utility lands ever printed and it stands as a symbol of just how powerful and important lands actually are. Lands don't cost mana, and you almost always get at least one a turn. Strip Mine's lesson is just how scary that "almost" is. No format allows for more than one in your deck, because if you could play more than one it would allow you to lock down any opponent with more expensive cards than you, by effectively unplaying their land from the previous turn. The land that hates land is a lesson about why land, and Magic's mana system in general, is so precious.

Runner Up: Mana Confluence - When looking at lands without basic land types that just produce mana, nothing hits quite like Mana Confluence. Legal in nearly every format, generically good but not broken - this is the true neutral of nonbasic lands, and arguably a baseline against which all others can be judged.

Conclusion

In general, pretty poorly.

Shirei’s trigger looks at the creature’s power as it last existed on the battlefield, which includes the +1/-1 from Skullclamp. So that 1/1 creature you just Skullclamped died as a 2/0 and won’t trigger Shirei. You’ll need to be Skullclamping 0/1′s to get any extra value from Shirei.