Marquee card

A marquee card was a splashy rare card that appeared in early Magic: The Gathering sets, and did something Magic had never done before.

Description
Mark Rosewater got the idea from the popularity of Jester's Cap in the Ice Age. A marquee card could go into any deck (usually an artifact, but it could in theory be a land — colorless spells didn't exist yet).

The tradition of creating marquee cards petered out in Tempest when the Rules Manager kept Mark Rosewater from printing "Helm of Volrath", which would later be Mindslaver. For various reasons it couldn't be done. Rosewater tried it again years later in Mirrodin where he got it through.

Many years later, Rosewater concluded the concept of a marquee card was a "silly pet theory" of his that "wasn't necessary".