Aven Riftwatcher
Vanishing turns a conditional lifegain spell into a guaranteed one. The enters-or-leaves trigger reads like a single gift of two life, with a second payout dangling only if the creature leaves the battlefield. Plenty of cards with that template never reach the back half: an opponent who reads the text simply declines to kill the thing, and the second two life never arrives. Here the timer settles the matter. Three upkeeps after it lands, the bird strips its last time counter and sacrifices itself on its own schedule, firing the leaves-the-battlefield trigger no matter what the opponent does. The full four life is promised to anyone patient enough to let the clock run. What you trade for that certainty is permanence: a 2/3 flier that can block and trade for exactly three turns before it expires, a wall with an expiration date rather than a body you anchor a board around. The same structure makes it a natural target for flicker and recursion, each re-entry resetting the timer and re-triggering the lifegain half. As a use of vanishing, it reframes the self-destruct counter not as a drawback to endure but as the mechanism that forces the second payment, treating the creature's death as a scheduled event the controller has already been paid for.
