Having grown too prosperous to continue her vocation as a ship's captain, Vance found a solution in the form of a cliff with a natural lava flow running down it
By using Pippins first activated to trigger Merrys, you can build up a decent token force that you can later buff with Pippin
Most won't attack your stuff or cast mass removal since you'll replace it with another dork, and with Volrath's Stronghold you can choose which one you draw from your graveyard
The peak for this kind of removal is Attrition, which is borderline mass removal if you are playing the right deck
Several categories of fakes cards will fail this test: for instance re-backed Collectors Edition (which also have a distinctive, glossy feeling like poker cards) as well as several type of old Chinese proxies
Somehow, its gone 30 years without a reprint, which is wild for any card