Fractured Identity
Removal and theft folded into one asymmetric package, and the asymmetry is the whole engine. Most steal-a-permanent effects hand you the original object: Control Magic and its heirs let you keep the thing your opponent paid for. This works in reverse. The target leaves the battlefield entirely (exiled, not destroyed, so it dodges death triggers and regeneration), and what you get is a fresh copy, a token that arrives new with no summoning sickness relief but also no counters, no attachments, no accumulated history from the original. That distinction matters against anything with charge counters or a stack of enchantments, because you are copying the printed object, not the battlefield object. The clause that "each player other than its controller" creates the copy is quietly the reason it earns five mana: in a duel it reads as a clean one-for-one trade of their best permanent for your token of it, but the effect scales with the number of opponents, seeding copies around a multiplayer table in a single cast. It answers planeswalkers, gods, indestructible threats, and commanders alike, since it never needs the target to die; it just needs it gone. The design lives at the intersection of answer and threat, which is a hard place to price, and it lands there by making the copy the reward for solving the problem.








