Undercover Operative

Clone effects have always carried an ownership tax: copy an opponent's best creature and it is a great deal, copy your own and you have paid full retail for a redundant body. This one closes that gap by rewarding the mirror. Copy something you already control and the clone lands protected, so the copy you least wanted to make (doubling up on your own bomb) becomes the copy that survives the removal spell aimed at killing it. The shield counter turns a duplicate into a redundancy that resists a one-for-one answer, which quietly changes how a clone reads on the stack: an opponent holding a kill spell now has to weigh whether spending it on the original is worth it when the copy shrugs off the first attempt. The self-copy also plays around destruction-based wraths better than a plain clone, since the counter is removed in place of the first destroy effect before the creature is. It sits in the long line of blue shapeshifters descended from the original Clone template, but where most of that lineage optimizes for stealing the biggest thing across the table, this design tilts the incentive back toward your own board, giving copy-value decks a reason to run out a second copy of their own engine rather than always mirroring the opponent's threat.