Zenos yae Galvus // Shinryu, Transcendent Rival
The two halves tell a single story about attachment turned into a win condition. The front side's entry effect is a battlefield-wide sweep that spares exactly two creatures: itself and one opponent's creature, the one it has decided is worthy. That -2/-2 clears the board of everything smaller while deliberately leaving the chosen creature alive, which is the whole trick, because the transform trigger only fires when that specific creature leaves the battlefield. You are not being punished for killing it; you are being invited to. Zenos wants his chosen rival dead, and the card's mechanics are engineered so that your removing that creature (or the opponent trading it away) flips a 4/4 into a Dragon whose win condition is already loaded.
Shinryu picks up flying and, on transform, names an opponent whose loss becomes your victory. This is an alternate win packaged as a two-part sequence rather than a single alt-win engine like Thassa's Oracle or Laboratory Maniac: the front side has to resolve, mark a target, and see that target die before the payoff even arrives, and only then does the "when the chosen player loses, you win" clause matter. The design leans hard into its source material, where obsessive rivalry drives the character, and it renders that obsession in rules as a card that must fixate on one enemy creature, watch it fall, and only then reveal what it was really after.




