Hired Muscle // Scarmaker
The flip creatures of this era tied their transformation to a counter you accumulated by doing what your deck already wanted to do, and here that engine runs on the Spiritcraft theme. The front side is a 2/2 with two triggers, not a vanilla body: it banks a ki counter every time you put a Spirit or Arcane card on the stack, and once two counters sit on it, the end-step flip is yours to take or decline. The flip is what the card is really about, and it inverts the relationship the front side built. Where Hired Muscle hoards ki, Scarmaker spends it, peeling a counter off to hand any creature fear: not unblockable, but slippery enough that only black or artifact creatures can stop the swing. That asymmetry is the design knot worth noticing. A Kamigawa flip card sheds its front-side text box on transformation, so once Scarmaker arrives the fountain stops filling; you flip with a fixed pool of counters and burn them down, one evasion grant at a time. The card is a closed account rather than a renewable engine: the front face takes deposits while it sits there, and Scarmaker writes checks against the balance until it runs dry. The body never grows and the flip is optional, so the whole thing leans on a critical mass of cheap triggers to bank enough ki to matter before the toggle even becomes worth pulling.
