Mistform Seaswift

The Mistform cycle exists to break the contract that tribal sets quietly depend on: that creature types are fixed properties you build around. Onslaught-block tribal lived and died on the type line, with lords pumping Goblins or Soldiers and effects keying off specific tribes, so a creature that can pay one mana to declare itself any type at will is a saboteur in that design space. This one wears the morph keyword like the rest of the block, hiding under a 2/2 face-down body until you have the mana to flip it, and arrives swinging with evasion that most of the changelings-before-changelings could not offer. The flying matters more than the type-shifting in raw board terms: a 3/1 in the air closes games that a ground-bound shapeshifter would not. But the design intent sits in the activated ability, which lets the creature dodge a tribe-specific removal spell, become a legal target for a lord's pump, or simply read as whatever the moment needs. It predates the changeling keyword that would later codify "is every creature type at once" as a clean static rule; the Mistforms got there by paying mana, one type at a time, on the turn it counted. That distinction (a chosen type rather than all of them) is the wrinkle that makes them a toolbox answer rather than a tribal enabler.