Lazav, Dimir Mastermind

The fantasy is theft made literal: kill your opponent's best creature, and Lazav stands up wearing its face. Everything turns on which zone change the trigger watches. A creature card going to an opponent's graveyard from anywhere lets you copy the template, so Lazav rewards the colors that already manufacture those moments: edicts, targeted kill spells, mill, and discard all feed the same engine. The hexproof matters more than the 3/3 body suggests, because it answers the obvious counterplay to a copy effect on a fragile creature: point removal at Lazav before it becomes anything worthwhile. With hexproof carried forward into every new form, targeted removal is off the table, so opponents are pushed toward combat, board wipes, and non-targeting answers like sacrifice and edict effects to interact at all. The copy clause is careful, too: Lazav keeps its own name, so it never trips the legend rule against itself, and it re-grants the hexproof-and-trigger package to whatever it impersonates, meaning the engine survives each transformation. What stops the whole thing from being oppressive is its dependency on what the opponent owns. Lazav generates nothing in a vacuum; it is a parasite that needs a host, and specifically a printed creature card, not a token. Against a deck that leans on tokens and copy effects rather than real bodies, the trigger simply never fires, leaving you a hexproof 3/3 waiting for a corpse worth wearing. That asymmetry, a removal suite that doubles as a toolbox, is the Dimir thesis distilled into a single Shapeshifter.