Chromatic Armor

Damage prevention as a war of attrition rather than a fixed shield. The sleight counter is the engine: the Aura enters protecting the creature against one chosen color, and each activation lets you choose a new color, but only by stacking another counter, with the cost equal to however many counters are already present. Counters here only accumulate; nothing ever strips them off, so every swap costs more than the one before it. The first redirection of the shield is nearly free; the fourth or fifth is a serious mana commitment. The result is a card built to win one drawn-out argument about which color matters, not to flicker freely between threats. Its protection is narrow in a specific way: it stops only damage from the most recently chosen color, so non-damage removal and colorless sources walk right past it. This rewards patience and information. You set the color against a known threat, then ratchet it as the board shifts, paying an ever-rising price to stay one move ahead of whatever your opponent has committed to. The card sits with the era's broader experiment in counters as a creeping cost rather than a single triggered payoff: the kind of fiddly, incremental damage-prevention puzzle that older sets built subthemes around before the design language moved toward cleaner, more decisive protection.