For generations, chemists accepted copper's dominance in metal stability as a law written into the fabric of matter itself — an expression of electrons, not circumstance. A team at KAIST has now shown that this hierarchy is not fate but architecture: by engineering the hydrogen-bonded environment surrounding a metal complex, researchers caused copper to lose its long-held crown to its neighbors in the periodic table. The discovery reframes a foundational principle of coordination chemistry, suggesting that what we once called intrinsic may in fact be deeply contextual.