Faithful Squire // Kaiso, Memory of Loyalty
The flip mechanic that drives this card counts your Spirit and Arcane casts, not your turns or your combat steps. Two ki counters accumulated on the front side and you may flip it at the end step, which means the whole payoff sits gated behind a tribe-and-spell shell rather than white good-stuff. The 2/2 with no evasion is inert until that condition is met, and the friction is real: in a deck that does not cast the right spells, the card simply never turns on. The back half is where the design gets odd. A flyer that spends its accumulated ki on repeatable, targeted damage prevention, fogging a single creature for a turn each time you remove a counter. That is a defensive engine fueled by an offensive triggering condition: you bank counters by casting your tribe's spells, then cash them to keep creatures (yours, or in the right spot theirs) alive through combat. The prevention reads as protection but functions as a combat-math eraser, blanking a blocker's strike or saving an attacker from a trade. The loop is the interesting part, because the resource you spend on defense can only be earned by playing aggressively toward your spell count. It asks you to be deep in one mechanical theme before it does anything, and answers that commitment not with a beater but with a reusable safety valve that meters out one save per stored counter.
