Boarded Window

Most defensive artifacts are static: they cost their mana, they do their job, and they sit on the battlefield forever. This one carries a self-destruct clause tied to how hard you get hit. The -1/-0 to attackers is a soft tax, the kind of blunting that turns a two-power attacker into a chump and lets your blockers trade up a point, but it is deliberately fragile: take four or more damage in a turn and the board defense you were leaning on abandons you at end of step. That conditional exile is the design's whole balancing act. It rewards the deck that stabilizes early, when incoming damage is small and the -1/-0 buys real time; it punishes the deck that is already losing the race, because the turn you most need the wall is the turn a big swing knocks it down. The flavor tracks the mechanics precisely: a barricade holds against a few attackers and splinters under a real assault. It is a piece of horror-set texture given a rules skeleton, an anti-aggro speed bump for the player who wants to survive the opening turns rather than the player already buried under them.