Empyrial Armor

Three mana buys an Aura whose payoff is written in a currency it does not actually spend: the +1/+1 scales with every card sitting in your grip, so the buff grows precisely when a White draw-heavy deck is doing what it wants (hoarding answers, holding counterspell bait, sitting behind a wall of held tricks) and collapses the moment you tap out. That is the tension built into the rate: the bonus is enormous on a full hand and embarrassing once your hand empties, which makes this an awkward request for an aggressive deck and a natural fit for a controlling one. The reward and the body pull in opposite directions, since the creature wearing the Armor is supposed to be a clock, yet the Armor pays best when you are not committing cards to advance the board. It also inherits the structural fragility every Aura carries: the whole investment evaporates if the creature dies, and here that risk is stacked on a target your opponent most wants to kill. Empyrial Armor is the early, honest version of a recurring White design question (how do you reward a deck for keeping its hand full?) that later cards have answered with less downside, attaching the payoff to safer permanents or spreading it across the board. Here, the entire bonus rides on a single, killable creature.