Livio, Oathsworn Sentinel

The aegis counter is a flicker engine dressed as protection, and that misdirection is deliberate. The first ability offers your opponents an out: they may exile a creature you point at, tucking it away from a board wipe or a targeted kill spell. The second ability is where the plan actually lives, returning every aegis-countered permanent at once under owners' control. That simultaneous return is the tension: you are not just protecting your own creatures, you are assembling a communal blink pile whose contents re-enter the battlefield together, refiring every enter-the-battlefield trigger the whole group has parked. A white two-drop that manufactures mass reanimation without ever touching the graveyard is a strange and rare thing, and the counter mechanic slips past the graveyard-hate answers that usually police this kind of effect. The catch is written into the wording: the controller of the targeted creature chooses whether to accept the shelter, so the political layer is genuine. Cards get squirreled away to survive a sweeper you are about to cast, then handed back the moment it benefits the table. Partner is what turns the toolbox into a deck: link the aegis engine to a legend that wants creatures flickering or entering repeatedly, and you close the loop the body alone never could. On its own the 2/2 is a slow, deliberate machine that needs a critical mass of triggers before it does anything explosive; alongside the right pairing, it becomes the reset button an entire creature strategy is built to abuse.