Its the queen of black midrange decks, stripping your opponents of resources very early while building towards a deadly ultimate
There are planeswalkers whose entire character revolves around artifacts
Since they usually have a theme of growing, experiment, and +1/+1 counters, the mechanic evolve was created for them and it made sense there
In Standard, you could be swinging for 16 damage on turn four with the right setup
I love the upside of using Archpriest of Shadows to back up a creature like Mercurial Spelldancer
Of course, today the vast majority of copies out there in the wild have the correct stats, and counter to what you might think, the misprinted version is actually worth less than the right version and its various reprints