Curie, Emergent Intelligence
The copy clause is where the design lives, and it works by grafting a rider onto whatever you exile rather than swapping abilities out. Left alone, the body is a 1/3 that draws a single card when it connects: fine, forgettable, and only worth anything if a 1/3 can find its way past blockers. The activation rewrites the ceiling by eating another artifact creature and becoming it, keeping all of that creature's copied abilities and adding one more on top: draw cards equal to base power on combat damage. The lever that matters is base power specifically. Not current power, not a stat pumped by counters or auras (those are not copied and do not move the number), but the creature's printed power. So the payoff is to point this at a fat artifact creature with a high printed body and turn one connection into three, four, or more cards, while inheriting that creature's own evasion or triggers in the bargain. The exile cost is the constraint that stops it from spiraling: each transformation permanently consumes a nontoken artifact creature from your board, so the engine trades width for depth and can never recycle its own fuel. It descends from a lineage of blue creatures that launder combat damage into cards, from Ophidian onward, but most of those draw a flat one. Scaling the draw to a number you choose by choosing your exile target is what pulls it out of value-trigger territory and into engine-piece territory.



