See Double

Copy spells have always forced a design tension: they scale infinitely with the target, so the printed cost has to buy something modest by default or the card breaks in half. This one resolves it by splitting the copy engine into two modes that rarely coexist. Fork-style spell-copying and clone-a-creature effects have historically lived on separate cards with separate costs; folding both onto one instant means you pay for flexibility, not raw power, choosing the mode that matches the board. The graveyard clause is what turns the card from fair to rewarding. Eight cards in an opponent's yard is a threshold reached late, in grindy games where a single copy is often not enough to turn a corner, and at that point the spell unlocks both modes at once: copy their bomb and duplicate your best creature off one card. That "you may choose both instead" applies delve-adjacent thinking to modality rather than cost, treating an opponent's graveyard as the resource that widens what a single spell can do. The self-protection line ("this spell can't be copied") quietly acknowledges what copy effects do to each other on a crowded stack: without it, a mirror of copy spells becomes an untangleable loop. A blue instant built for the long game, priced so the early version is fair and the late version reads as a payoff for outgrinding the opponent.