Dauthi Trapper

Shadow is the cleanest evasion keyword Magic ever printed: a creature with it can only block or be blocked by other shadow creatures, which on a board with no shadow means it cannot be blocked at all and cannot block anything either. The Dauthi were the tribe built to exploit that, a roster of small black beaters that simply could not be stopped on the ground. What this card does is take that closed-off keyword and turn it into a weapon pointed at the opponent. By granting shadow to a target creature, it pulls that creature out of normal combat math entirely: a defender's best blocker can be handed shadow and stranded, unable to interact with the attack it was meant to stop. The reverse works too, since the grant can be aimed at your own attacker to push damage through a clogged board. The body is incidental; the value sits in a repeatable tap ability that rewrites the combat step every turn it survives. That it costs no mana per activation makes it a recurring tax on the opponent's defensive plan rather than a one-shot trick. Shadow has stayed largely confined to its original tribes, which makes the cards that manipulate it from the outside a small and strange category, and this is the purest expression of the idea: the ability to decide, each turn, which creature gets locked out of the only combat that matters.