Deepfathom Echo
Explore usually smooths a draw once: reveal, bank a land or a growth counter, move on. This Merfolk turns that one-time smoothing into a combat-phase ritual, exploring every turn before attacks are declared, and that repetition is only the setup. After the explore resolves, it can take on the form of any other creature you control until end of turn, keeping every counter it has stacked along the way. The timing is precise: the trigger fires at the beginning of combat, so the copy is locked in for the swing and reverts before your opponent untaps. Those counters are what separate this from a Clone on legs. Each explore that whiffs on a land leaves a permanent +1/+1 behind, so the copied body arrives already inflated past the printed stats of whatever it imitates, and that growth outlives the impersonation. The card wants a board with one high-value creature worth wearing and a land count low enough that the explores keep hitting counters rather than cards. Repeatable copying on a green-blue frame is unusual company: cloning that fires again and again has almost always lived in mono-blue, tethered to spells and flicker. Bolting it to a self-growing green body redirects the mechanic toward a creature-density plan, where the copy target and the impersonator are both permanents already on the battlefield rather than a stack of instants doing the work.
