Clockwork Swarm

The clockwork mechanic is one of the era's purest attempts at modeling a wind-up toy in rules text: a creature that arrives at full charge and runs down as it works. The four +1/+0 counters make this a 4/3 the turn it shows up, but every combat it participates in strips a counter, so its offense is a depleting resource rather than a static threat. The recharge clause is the discipline that makes the design honest: you can only wind it back up during your own upkeep, paying mana per counter, and the ceiling is hard-capped at four. There is no overcharging it past its rated output, and there is no fixing it on the turn you most want to. That upkeep-only restriction is the real friction; it forces a tempo tax, asking you to spend a turn's mana priming the body before it can swing at full strength again, which means the card is always either attacking or being maintained, never both at once. The toughness never moves, which is the other half of the math: the counters only ever buy power, so this stays a fragile 0/3 frame dressed up in attack value. It is a curio of a vanished design philosophy, the kind of literal-minded mechanical flavor that later sets abandoned in favor of keywords that did not require a counter-tracking subgame every combat.