Metallic Mimic

Most tribal payoffs reward you for having already committed to a creature type: they count your Goblins, they pump your Elves, they punish you for diversifying. This one inverts the relationship by letting the lord pick the tribe on the way in, which means it slots into any deck built around a single creature type without being printed for that type specifically. The chosen-type clause turns a colorless 2/1 into Goblin support, Elf support, or Human support depending on what hits the table first. The counter mechanic is the part worth dwelling on. Anthem effects size your team while they stay in play and shrink it the moment they die; the +1/+1 counters here are permanent, riding on the creatures themselves rather than the Mimic. That makes the buff resilient to removal aimed at the lord, but it also gates the value strictly forward: only creatures that enter after the Mimic get the counter, so a Mimic cast on an empty board pays off and a Mimic cast into a developed board does almost nothing for what is already down. The artifact type is the quiet enabler, letting the effect cross color boundaries into decks that share a tribe but not a guild. The design tension is between the flexibility of choosing late and the punishment for choosing late: the more board you have, the less the choice is worth.