Feral Thallid

Three full turns of banking spore counters before regeneration can be cashed even once: that is the whole story of this design. A counter accrues every upkeep, and the printed regeneration costs three of them, so the shield is not a recurring safety net but a single insurance payment you slowly save toward, spend, then start saving for all over again. The friction is deliberate. Spore counters here are tied to this body alone, never pooled into a shared resource, so regeneration is the only thing they can ever buy. The 6/3 is the tell: an oversized, fragile beater whose three toughness all but guarantees it trades down to a block or a burn spell, and a regeneration shield you can afford to raise once every three turns is poor protection for a body that dies to so much. The later Fungus designs that gave the mechanic a real payoff, converting counters into Saproling tokens, are nowhere in this card's own text; on its own it simply hoards a clock it can barely use. This belongs to the earliest generation of saved-resource design, where the counter is a meter you choose when to cash, and where the waiting was meant to make the eventual payoff feel earned rather than free. The waiting is here; the payoff, mostly, is somewhere else.