Hello again, dear readers!  Let me kick off this article by mentioning that, yes, the title implies that I’ll be writing one of these per day.  Not to be misleading or anything, but that may not be the case 100% of the time.  As a college student, I have many other obligations, such as Nintendo DS and Adult Swim, which may take up the time that I would normally use to write articles such as these.  Hopefully, though, I can do this often enough for my urge to comment on some of my favorite cards to be more or less sated.

Now, let’s get down to business!  The business, of course, is this guy:

I decided to do my first Card of the Day article on this creature because I’ve noticed that as good as he is, he’s incredibly underused in my current play group (I seem to remember one of my friends using him in a deck at some point, but he has since graduated and vanished off the face of the Earth, presumably into Toldeo, Ohio); not only that, but I don’t even remember any of us so much as discussing him at any point!  Now, I’m not exactly a walking encyclopedia of Magic, but I would normally hope that I would remember a card as useful and versatile as this one, what with the amount of casual and tournament play he sees on a still-regular basis (he was a hell of a weapon when Time Spiral block was in Standard).  Be that as it may, he’s on my mind today, and I would be loathe not to rave about him now.

I’ve always liked Morph cards; they provided for a host of neat little combat tricks before Wizards pussed out and stopped combat damage from using the stack (yeah, it was a good move flavor-wise, but come on!  So many cool interactions gone because the idea didn’t make real-world sense!  Hello!  This is a game about mighty wizards summoning random creatures out of the blue to throw at each other to see who’s better at being a wizard… it doesn’t even come close to making real-world sense!  Okay, I’ll stop now.).  Still, the ability to lay a mysterious 2/2 creature for 3 that could become anything at any time is pretty freaking awesome.  Granted, there were some crappy Morphs out there, but for the most part I was happy that they brought the ability back for Time Spiral block.  Vesuvan Shapeshifter is essentially the flagbearer for the Morph cards from those sets, and he really lives up to the title!  For a tawdry 3 colorless mana, you can get him on the board face-down; if it’s turn 5 he can just come down as anything already on the board, with the option of changing continuously at your whim.  Basically, you have a Clone that technically hits the table a turn earlier than the actual card Clone would, as you can play it face-down on turn 3 and morph it on turn 4, but it amps up the tricky factor to a whole new level.  If your opponents try to target it with something, if you happen to block with it, if it becomes blocked, or if it’s let through for damage, you can suddenly turn it into any other creature on the table for the nifty (gorgeous) price of 1U.  You can also use him as a surprise Legendary creature-slayer; it’ll be harder for your opponents to counter the effect, since you’re not just playing a Clone from your hand.

One neat little combo that I would like to mention involves Vesuvan Shapeshifter, Aphetto Runecaster, and/or Unblinking Bleb.  With these three cards out at once, you can keep morphing the Shapeshifter every turn and stack the Runecaster and Bleb triggers so that you can Scry 2 and then draw a card.  Constant library manipulation = awesome card advantage, and that usually leads to multiple games won.  The Runecaster in particular is a great card to use with the Shapeshifter, as you’re guaranteed an extra card every turn; this is a good way to get the usually clunky Archmage Ascension moving in the right direction, and of course will allow you to tutor up an extra card per turn once the Ascension kicks off.

I hope you enjoyed my little commentary on one of the best cards that I never see used; I’m certainly planning to get my hands on some in the near future.  They’re pretty cheap, and easy to get your hands on, so if you haven’t thought about giving this guy any use, think again!  If you get any cool deck ideas for him, feel free to put them in the Comments section; I’d love to see what you can come up with!