Defender en-Vec
Fading and damage prevention were built to talk to each other, and this is the cleanest illustration of that conversation. The fade counters are not just a clock counting down to the creature's death; they are ammunition. The body arrives with four fade counters, sheds one on each of your upkeeps, and converts every counter you choose to spend into a two-damage shield for any target, friend or foe. What makes the design hum is that the resource doing the killing is the same resource keeping the creature alive: spend counters to prevent damage now and you accelerate toward the upkeep where you have none left to remove and must sacrifice it; hoard them and they tick away on their own schedule anyway. There is no waste either way, which is the elegant part. The prevention fires at instant speed, so the counters can be cashed in response to a burn spell, during a combat-damage step, or at any point where two damage matters, with the sacrifice waiting at the far end as the natural expiry rather than a penalty for emptying the magazine. The mechanic rarely produced cards that felt fair to spend down voluntarily; most fade and vanishing creatures wanted you to extract value before the timer ran out. Here the timer and the value are the same number, which is a tidier piece of engineering than the keyword usually managed.
