Sculpting Steel

Clone effects had been around in blue since the beginning, but here the principle migrates to the artifact slot where it does something stranger. Where a creature clone has to find a body worth copying, this picks from a pool that is far more open-ended: any artifact, anyone's, including the most expensive thing on the table reduced to a flat three-mana price tag. It copies mana rocks for ramp, copies a game-ending bomb to double it, copies an opponent's centerpiece to neutralize the asymmetry of who got there first. The colorlessness is the quiet engine of all this; a copy effect that costs no colored mana fits any deck that runs artifacts at all, which is most of them, and it sidesteps the blue tax that clone effects normally carry. What keeps it honest is timing rather than cost. The artifact has to already be on the battlefield when this enters, so the value is entirely reactive to what the board already shows: with nothing worth copying, it sits in hand as a brick, and the best copies are the ones you cannot guarantee will be there. That dependency is the reason a three-mana copy-anything never tipped into broken. It is not a proactive threat; it is a mirror you hold up to whatever has already resolved, and the board has to supply the reflection.