Actually, there's no ethical or acceptable reason to make "proxies" to pass the light test, bend test, and other well-known tests to weed out fake cards because there's no ethical or acceptable use of proxies that requires the proxy to be as similar to a real card as possiblea Sharpie on a basic Island does the job just as well and without any of the legal and moral issues
Know a friend whod like this
Going turn one scry land is one of the best openers in cube these days, short of a Goblin Guide level one drop, it is what you want to be doing
And Elite Four, also the Fortress Leader, imposes a mutual conditional that, it seems to me, is designed to accentuate some broad characteristic of a type: statuses for Grass, alpha strike for Electric, retreat cost for Water, and so on
It has its own sacrifice archetype to slot into, but it's honestly just great in any black deck