Phantasmal Image

Clone is the predecessor here: copy any creature on the battlefield for a flat four mana, pay the cost up front, and keep the body around to defend. This halves that price to two, and the discount is bought with a single line of text: targeting it kills it. That fragility reshapes how the card behaves. A standard Clone wants to copy the best thing on the board and protect it; this one wants to copy something whose value lives in an enters-the-battlefield trigger or a static ability, and treat the resulting body as expendable, because a creature that evaporates the moment an opponent points removal at it is worth most for what it does on arrival, not what it does in a fight. The Illusion type and the sacrifice clause are the same drawback every cheap Illusion of its era carried, and they make the copy a fundamentally disposable asset: it can blink in as a copy of an opponent's bomb, soak a chump block, or steal an ETB effect, but it will not survive any spell or ability that singles it out. The design tension it resolves is the old problem of pricing a copy effect at two mana without handing blue free flexibility. The answer is to put the entire battlefield on the menu and then attach a kill switch that any targeted spell can flip. The escape hatch is that a sacrifice outlet bypasses the clause entirely: it removes the creature as a cost without targeting, so when the death itself is the payoff, the Image leaves on your terms rather than the opponent's.