Ascent of the Worthy

The first two chapters here are a defensive redirect dressed as a Saga: for two turns, all damage headed toward your creatures piles onto a single lightning rod of your choosing. Effects that funnel damage onto one creature are old news; folding one into a Saga's clock reframes it. You are not paying for a one-shot fog, you are buying two turns of controlled attrition while the counter ticks toward the payoff. The design resolves a real question about what to do with the creature you keep feeding damage into: it can soak up combat damage from multiple blockers, absorb a board sweep's worth of pings, or simply die and become chapter three's fuel. That third chapter reanimates a creature from your graveyard with a flying counter and grafts Angel Warrior onto it, which quietly turns the redirect chapters into setup rather than pure defense. The card wants you to feed a creature into the damage funnel across chapters I and II, then haul it back airborne on chapter III, upgraded. It is Orzhov attrition compressed into a single enchantment: soak, sacrifice, recur. The flying counter and the tribal grant are the tell about intent. This is not a control card that stalls; it treats your own creatures as a resource to be spent on schedule and reclaimed with interest, the redirect and the reanimation load-bearing halves of one loop rather than two unrelated modes stapled to a lore counter.