The Apprentice's Folly

Two clones with a countdown. The Saga chassis is what makes this design work: rather than a one-shot copy effect priced against its power, it doles the copies out across two chapters and then reclaims them on chapter III by sacrificing every Reflection you control. The token type is the mechanism that makes the bill collectible; each copy is stamped as a Reflection, so the third chapter knows exactly what to take back. That reads as a drawback, but it is really the timing knob the design is built around. The copies enter with haste, which matters most for chapter II's clone: it lands the turn before the sacrifice fires, so haste is the only thing that lets it attack at all. The chapter I copy is the one with a real lease, swinging across two turn cycles before the Saga forecloses; the second is a single combat phase of pressure, then gone. The same-name restriction (you can only copy a creature that doesn't share a name with a token you already control) keeps the effect from stacking into an unbounded army. The interesting seam is chapter III's wording: it sacrifices Reflections, not "tokens created by this Saga," which invites builds that either dodge the type entirely (a copied creature that strips its own Reflection subtype, a sacrifice outlet that cashes the token before the bill comes due) or lean into a payoff that triggers when the whole board of copies dies at once. It does the work a temporary-effect enchantment used to bolt on with an end-step cleanup clause, but with a fixed, telegraphed expiration the whole table can count down.