Your Own Face Mocks You
A scheme's worst enemy is a board that has nothing worth stealing, and this one solves that problem by refusing to whiff. The ceiling is theft-by-imitation: the archenemy points at up to two of the table's best creatures and mints copies, letting an overcommitted opposition hand over whatever it has spent the game assembling. The originals stay put, so this is cloning rather than seizure, but in a game where the archenemy is outnumbered, borrowing the table's finest bodies to turn back on it is often enough. The real design work is the backfill. The count is locked at two regardless of what the opponents have deployed: every target the board fails to offer is replaced one-for-one with a 4/4 colorless Scarecrow with vigilance, so the scheme never resolves empty. That guarantee matters most in exactly the games where a thin board would otherwise leave the lone player scrambling. Guaranteeing the deployment beats maximizing it. The vigilance on the Scarecrows tilts the fallback toward offense: when nobody has a clone worth taking, the tokens can swing into one opponent and still stand back to block another's crackback, which is precisely the pressure a single player facing several needs. Two threats, always, their identity flexing with the board. The scheme reads as dangerous whether the table has built a toolbox to raid or left the archenemy nothing but Scarecrows.
