Who's That Praetor?
A game-show punchline built on a genuinely mean random table. The joke rides on the guess-the-silhouette bit, but the design work is in the list: five of the six options are among the most powerful legendary creatures printed in their era, and the sixth is Ebon Praetor, an old sacrifice-hungry Fallen Empires body that predates the whole "Praetor" naming convention. That last entry is the tell that this is a joke card, and it is also the reason spinning the wheel carries real downside; roughly one time in six you spend six mana to make a copy of a fragile creature that eats your other creatures to attack. The rest of the time you land Sheoldred, the Apocalypse, Elesh Norn, Mother of Machines, or one of the other Phyrexian praetors as a token, which is an obscene rate for a single sorcery. The card is a study in how randomness lets a designer staple absurd payoffs to a silly premise: you cannot choose the Sheoldred, so the expected value stays high enough to tempt without being a tutor. It is comedy that happens to be a roll of the die with excellent odds, and the humor and the payoff are the same mechanic wearing two hats.
