Ashnod

Punitive deterrence rendered as a standing rule: anything that connects with you dies for the privilege. That single line inverts combat math, because every successful attacker becomes a one-time weapon against itself. Sending a creature in is a trade the attacker may not want to make, and the avatar never spends a card or a mana to enforce it. The retaliation is a triggered ability, so it goes on the stack and can in principle be answered: a sacrifice outlet in response denies you the kill, and indestructibility shrugs the destroy off entirely. But because the effect reads "destroy it" rather than targeting, the usual protective tools (hexproof, protection) do nothing once the ability resolves; there is no spell to counter ahead of time and no permanent to remove. It taxes aggression for the length of the game and quietly reshapes who wants to be the beatdown. The Vanguard avatars came out of an early, casual-only experiment in handing each player a passive identity that warped the whole game; they never entered constructed play, so this reads less as a card than as a design sketch, a study in how a free retaliatory effect bends a format's incentives. The flavor lands cleanly on Ashnod, the Terisiare artificer known for turning the living into machinery: her avatar treats your attackers as raw material to be unmade.