Clockwork Steed

A wind-up toy rendered in counters: it runs down the more you use it. The steed sits at the small end of its cycle, sharing the same engine as Clockwork Beast and Clockwork Avian, a 0/3 frame loaded to 4/3 by its four starting counters and bleeding one back every time it swings or blocks. The friction is deliberate and total. The counters never return during combat, only during your upkeep, only by paying mana, and never past the original four. So the card is a battery you spend down in fights and slowly recharge between them, and the recharge taxes your tempo: rebuilding the steed and developing your board pull on the same resource. What you end up holding is a threat that is strongest the first time it attacks and steadily worse after, a tempo curve baked into the card itself rather than into the player's sequencing. That the body underneath is a 0/3 is the joke and the safety valve at once: drain the counters and you are left with a wall that cannot attack for anything. It is tidy mid-nineties design thinking, the kind of self-limiting clock Wizards built before evergreen keywords standardized how aggression gets priced. It reads now less as a playable threat than as an artifact of an era that tried to model machinery wearing out with mechanics instead of flavor text.