Luminarch Ascension

The conditional is the entire engine: end an opponent's turn having lost no life, and a quest counter goes on; take so much as a single point, and you simply don't earn one that turn. The counters already banked never come off, so even an interrupted run of safe turns locks in permanent progress toward the four-counter threshold. That clause turns a cheap enchantment into a contract you have to actively defend, which is why this card sorts players into two camps. Drop it on an empty board against an aggressive deck and it does nothing while you bleed; drop it behind a stabilized board or a wall of removal and it manufactures a 4/4 flier every turn, indefinitely, for two mana an activation. The patience tax is the cost of the threshold itself: in a duel that means surviving four clean end steps before any payoff, which rewards control shells that can guarantee those turns and punishes anyone trying to run it on tempo. The trigger keys off each opponent's end step, not your own, so the math bends sharply with the table: a single untouched turn cycle in a multiplayer game can hand over several counters at once, collapsing the wait that makes the card so demanding one-on-one. It is a finisher wearing a two-drop's clothes, asking only that you not lose life while everything else you've assembled holds the line.