Like Precious's Ribbon before it, the collar is obtained from Blinky on the way to Vorasius inside the Voidspire raid. Equipping it also grants the Blinky's Collar buff, imparting a bit of flavor text.
Blinky's Collar is awarded as untradeable personal loot, though everyone will get a respectable amount of gold.
Besides being a cute throwback to Icecrown Citadel, the new shirt has another interesting feature and connection to Wrath of the Lich King, in that its model shares an appearance with the famed Martin Fury.
While Blinky's Collar is new, its appearance is actually very old.
The Original Artifact
Although now only a grey item with a questionably self-destructive effect, the Martin Fury was once one of the game's original artifacts: unobtainable gold-quality development items which were never actually intended to be used by players. Among them, Martin Fury is the oldest that we know of, still carrying the distinction of having the lowest remaining item id in the game.
In addition to being a plate shirt with actual stats, the original Martin Fury also had a much more useful special effect.
Unlike most of the other artifacts, Martin Fury became infamous because it actually did make its way into the hands of a player. Shortly after the release of Patch 3.1 in April 2009, a player named Leroyspeltz from <The Marvel Family> on Vek'nilash-US had just recovered several characters that had been deleted from their account after a hack months prior, complete with mountains of items and gear helpfully mailed back to them by GMs. Among the items recovered on a level 13 Warlock was the Martin Fury.
Interestingly, Martin Fury was not the first artifact players ever got their hands on, as Death Knights were able to obtain Tigole's Trashbringer during the Wrath of the Lich King alpha test.
At the time, it was fairly common for hacked characters to be returned with an odd assortment of items. Sometimes, previously owned gear was lost forever, though it was much more common that the player would find their inventory stuffed with random crafting materials and gold accumulated by whatever farmer had gained control of their account. Because of this, and because the items were returned via in-game mail from a Blizzard Game Master, the strange artifact didn't seem all that suspicious and was initially believed to be a gimmick sent over as a gag.
Item restoration via in-game mail was quite common at the time.
Until they tried it. The artifact was discovered while a guild group was working their way through the recently opened Ulduar, though because Leroyspeltz couldn't actually equip the preposterously plate shirt, it was traded to guild master and main tank Karatechop instead. Testing it on Ignis, the group quickly realized the shirt was actually real, which they found to be absolutely hilarious. Over the next few days, Karatechop used 14 of its 100 charges in Ulduar, Obsidian Sanctum, and Eye of Eternity, unwittingly acquiring several world first achievements and drawing the ire of Blizzard developers.
One shotting the 353,892,967 health hardmode Flame Leviathan was one of the shirt's many feats.
The following Tuesday, the entire guild was banned, including members who were not even involved in the raids. Although the vast majority of them were unbanned within 24 hours, Karatechop's account was permanently closed, even after appealing the decision to Blizzard - still earnestly believing it was intentionally given and innocently used. By the release of Patch 3.2, the shirt was depreciated directly, reducing its quality and replacing the effect with the one we see today.
