Primal Clay

One of the earliest expressions of "modal creature" in Magic's design vocabulary, and a template later shapeshifter-on-entry bodies have spent decades refining. The three modes are deliberately spread across the combat triangle: a 3/3 ground beater, a 2/2 evasive clock, and a 1/6 wall that trades attack rights for brick toughness. Each profile is roughly fair for four mana on its own; the value is the choice itself, made after you see the board rather than locked at deckbuilding. That decision-point structure (one card, three creatures, fixed on resolution) is the design idea later modal bodies would inherit, but the load-bearing insight is already present: a colorless artifact body can carry the cost of three different cards at once, because at any given moment it only resolves into one of them. The flavor scaffolding (literal clay, shaped by the caster's intent) does a lot of work selling what is, mechanically, an abstract piece of decision theory. It is also one of the earliest artifact creatures printed with a defender-equivalent mode, predating the defender keyword itself; the original text used the older "cannot attack" phrasing that was later folded into the keyword during the rules cleanup.