Illithid Harvester // Plant Tadpoles

Ceremorphosis is one of the more literal mechanics ever printed: the mind flayers of the source material implant a tadpole and remodel a creature into something new, and the card enacts that by turning tapped nontoken creatures face down into 2/2 Horrors. The nontoken clause is the first tell that this is a curated effect rather than a mass reset: token armies pass through untouched, and the trigger only lands on real bodies on the battlefield. What it actually does is set the creature's copiable characteristics to a vanilla 2/2 with no abilities, no name, and no printed stats. That erases the threat's evasion, its activated abilities, and whatever made its combat math scary, but it does not scrub what is layered on top: counters stay on the permanent, auras and equipment remain attached and keep applying to the new 2/2 base. A giant sized up by a stack of +1/+1 counters becomes a smaller giant, not a helpless one. The catch is the timing condition: it only touches tapped creatures, so the effect waits for attackers to commit rather than answering a fresh threat on demand. The Adventure half solves that setup problem in advance. Plant Tadpoles taps X creatures and locks them through their next untap step, which reads as a tempo lockdown but is really priming the board: you tap the things you intend to transform, then cast the Harvester later from exile to cash in the tapped field at once. It is a two-part play written as one card, the horror flavor tracking the mechanics at every step.