Copy Artifact

Among the original Alpha designs that treated "copy" as a primitive, this is the template thirty years of artifact-cloning has been priced against. The trick is in the type-line sleight of hand: the card resolves as an enchantment that becomes a copy of an artifact, taking on all of its abilities while keeping its enchantment card type alongside the artifact type it inherits. Because the choice is made as the enchantment enters the battlefield, not by targeting, it ignores shroud and hexproof on the thing it copies, sidestepping the protection that walls off most removal and clone effects alike. That extra type is not flavor text either; it changes what removes the card, what tutors find it, and what the opponent has to leave up to answer it. Where a creature clone is a tempo play that trades one body for a better one, this is a permanent-doubling effect on a base of permanents that already tend to be engines: mana rocks, lock pieces, equipment, combo halves. The asymmetry of cost is the whole pitch, since copying something expensive for two mana was printed before Wizards had developed the discipline around that math. Later effects such as Copy Enchantment, Mirrormade, and Sculpting Steel all descend from this template, but each is templated more carefully: Copy Enchantment swaps the artifact restriction for an enchantment one, Mirrormade hits either type at a higher rate, Sculpting Steel narrows back to artifacts and costs more. The original sits at cheap, flexible, and unconditional all at once, which is why designers still measure how much a copy is allowed to cost against it.