Distorting Lens

Color is the one property of a permanent that almost no effect touches, which is exactly why this little artifact reads as so strange and so quietly useful. Most cards treat color as fixed, a deckbuilding decision locked in at the printing stage; this one turns it into a knob you can spin at any moment, on anything in play, including permanents your opponent controls. The interactions branch in two directions. Defensively, it answers color-hosing: a creature dying to a protection-from-black blocker can be recolored out of harm's way, and a permanent about to eat color-specific removal can dodge by becoming a color the spell does not name. Offensively, it weaponizes the same hosers: paint an opposing creature the wrong color before a one-sided sweep that spares a single shade, or recolor a permanent into the teeth of a Red Elemental Blast or a Pyroblast. The tap symbol and the end-of-turn duration cap the ambition: one target per turn, gone when the turn ends, so it works as a setup piece rather than a repeatable lock. The effect is narrow enough that it lives in combo and toolbox corners rather than fair midrange, but the design idea (color as a manipulable resource rather than a fixed attribute) is one Wizards has returned to rarely and never made cheaper or more flexible than this.