Etched Champion

Protection from each color, gated behind a deckbuilding tax rather than a mana cost. With three artifacts on the battlefield, a 2/2 body becomes one of the hardest creatures in the game for a color-based deck to interact with: it cannot be blocked by colored creatures, cannot be targeted by colored removal, and shrugs off colored combat damage. The metalcraft condition is doing all the balancing work, because the protection is binary and total. Break the artifact count and it is a vanilla 2/2; meet it and fair decks built on colored interaction simply cannot answer it. That asymmetry is the entire design: the word here is "each color," not "everything," so colorless removal, edicts, board wipes, and chump-everything defenses still beat it cleanly, but the conventional toolkit of point removal and combat blocks does not. The card weaponizes the gap between answers that target by color and answers that do not, and in any shell dense enough to keep three artifacts online, that gap is enormous. It is an unusually pure expression of protection as a keyword: not a defensive nicety stapled onto a creature, but the creature's whole reason to exist, turned into a clock an opponent can only race or sweep rather than trade with.