Mask of the Mimic

Put a creature directly onto the battlefield for a single blue mana and the rate looks broken until you read the two costs paying for it. The first is the sacrifice clause: you have to feed a creature to cast it. The second is the targeting parameter doing the real balancing work, because the card you fetch must share a name with a target nontoken creature already on the board. That naming requirement is what stops a blue tutor from cheating an arbitrary fatty into play: the deck has to manufacture a legal target before the spell can resolve, and tokens do not qualify. Since same-name cards are functionally identical, the payoff is purely about quantity and timing, not about trading up to a better printing. The sequencing trap is worth stating plainly, because targets are chosen before costs are paid: point the spell at a creature you can match from your library, then sacrifice a different body to fetch a fresh copy at instant speed. Sacrifice the named target itself and the spell loses its target and fizzles, so the fodder and the named creature must always be two distinct permanents. Where it earns its keep is as a backdoor combo enabler, assembling a second copy of a creature you need in multiples, or as a way to bank an extra body at instant speed in response to a board wipe or a removal spell aimed elsewhere. A tutor priced for the constraint it carries, not the rate it advertises.