Invasion of Xerex // Vertex Paladin

Assign-a-defender is the wrinkle that turns this from a free two-for-one into a race. The front is a soft Man-o'-War: bounce a creature on entry to buy tempo, then a designated opponent gets the job of keeping the siege standing while you (and whoever else has a reason to swing) chip its defense away. Break through that number and the front is exiled, and the transformed back arrives on the same board that just cleared it. The defense value is where the whole design lives. It has to sit low enough that clearing it in a turn or two is realistic, but high enough that the protecting opponent has genuine agency over whether you ever collect. When it falls, the payoff is a flyer sized to your board, which quietly locks the two halves together: the deck already going wide is both the deck that cracks the front fastest and the deck that flips Vertex Paladin into a finisher. The bodies you spent breaking the siege are the same bodies pumping the Angel Knight afterward, so the tempo you invest on the front converts directly into stats on the back. It is tidy siege engineering, using the defender assignment to give an opponent a real say in a card that would otherwise be a no-risk value flip.