Escaped Shapeshifter

A defensive mirror that turns an opponent's keyword soup back on them. The design idea is parasitic in the literal sense: this 3/4 body has nothing inherent beyond its frame, and every evasion or combat keyword it borrows is read off whatever the opposition is fielding. Build a board full of fliers and tramplers, and you have armed the thing across the table to match you point for point. The protection clause is the subtlest line, and the easiest to misread: this creature does not gain protection from the colors its opponent is playing, it copies the protection ability itself. If an opponent fields a creature with protection from red, this Shapeshifter gains protection from red too; the keyword is mirrored, not derived from the board's color spread. The self-exclusion (the explicit "not named Escaped Shapeshifter" carve-out) is the templating that keeps the ability from feeding itself: two copies cannot bootstrap keywords off each other into a loop. The whole creature wants to be the thing it points at. The more loaded an opponent's board, the more this becomes a generically excellent threat; the barer their board, the more it reverts to a vanilla blue beater. That makes it one of the stranger expressions of the Shapeshifter tribe's identity, a creature defined entirely by the company it keeps on the other side of the table, betting on the texture of someone else's battlefield rather than your own.