The Animus
The two-mana price hides a genuinely unusual clone: instead of copying something on the battlefield, this reanimates identity from the graveyard through an intermediary step. The end-step trigger banks a dead legendary creature into exile under a memory counter, and the tap ability later stamps that stored form onto a legend you already control, but only until your next turn. That temporary-copy clause is the whole balancing act. Most reanimation puts the body back permanently; here you never own the creature itself, only its shape, on loan, and only through a legendary vessel that has to survive to carry it. The sorcery-speed restriction on the activation closes the door on instant-speed shenanigans, forcing the copy step into your own main phase. What results is a slow, deliberate engine that trades tempo for optionality: a rolling library of dead legends you can borrow one at a time, reshaping the same creature into a different threat or utility body turn after turn. The design leans hard on there being enough legendary bodies in a deck to feed both halves, which narrows where it lives without narrowing what it can do once it gets going. It is less a bomb than a control panel for a graveyard full of legends, rewarding a build that treats its own dead as inventory.


