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Moxonomy

Nightmare Shepherd

Enchantment Creature — Demon2 generic manaBlack manaBlack mana

The insurance policy for a battlefield full of value creatures. Every nontoken creature that dies under this Demon's watch can be exiled and returned as a shrunken 1/1 copy, which means every enters-the-battlefield trigger, every static ability, every death trigger comes back for a second lap. Shrinking the copy to 1/1 is what stops the effect from snowballing: you get the text, not the body, so the copies fuel sacrifice engines and chump-block duty rather than rebuilding your board's combat presence. The exile clause carries a quieter cost worth noticing: replacing your dead creatures with copies empties your own graveyard, so the Demon actively fights any plan that wants bodies in the bin (reanimation, delve, threshold) rather than back in play. The "nontoken" restriction closes the obvious loop: the copies it makes cannot themselves trigger it, so there is no infinite regeneration engine hiding in the text. What results is a demon that rewards a deck built on creatures whose value lives in their arrival rather than their stats: aristocrats shells, blink-adjacent value piles, anything that would rather have the trigger twice than the creature once. The flying 4/4 body is almost incidental to the engine, but it does give the card a clock of its own while the recursion loop grinds the opponent down.

Nightmare Shepherd (pthb)
PTHB · #108srare
Pricing
Normal:
Foil: $1.61
Oracle Text

Rules text

Flying Whenever another nontoken creature you control dies, you may exile it. If you do, create a token that's a copy of that creature, except it's 1/1 and it's a Nightmare in addition to its other types.
Legalities

Format Status

Standard
N/A
Pioneer
Legal
Modern
Legal
Legacy
Legal
Vintage
Legal
Commander
Legal
Pauper
N/A
Brawl
Legal
Historic
Legal
Alchemy
N/A
Timeless
Legal
Standard Brawl
N/A
More formats
Old School
N/A
Premodern
N/A
PreDH
N/A
Pauper Commander
N/A
Oathbreaker
Legal
Gladiator
Legal
Penny Dreadful
Legal
Duel Commander
Legal
Future Standard
N/A
COMPETITIVEBRAWL
Legal
TLR
N/A
Printings elsewhere

Other printings

4 sets
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