Mace of the Valiant

Equipment that scales with your board rather than sitting at a fixed bonus, which is why it plays differently from the flat +X/+X gear that came before it. The counters are the trick: every creature you control that enters ratchets the buff up, so the Mace rewards a wide, go-again creature deck the way an anthem does, but banks the value on a single carrier instead of spreading it thin. The vigilance is what makes that carrier honest. A creature accumulating a steadily larger bonus is a threat both players want to trade with, and letting it swing without tapping means it defends the counters it just earned. Because the charge counters live on the Equipment, not the creature, they survive a blocked-and-killed wielder: reattach after a board wipe or a chump and the accumulated bonus comes right back, which turns the equip cost into an insurance premium rather than a sunk investment. The build-around ask is real, though. It keeps counting bodies even while unequipped, so a board that floods before the Mace ever gets attached still banks the bonus; the danger is the reverse, a slow opening where the carrier arrives before the counters do. Its ceiling is a token engine or a low-curve flood of triggers every turn; its floor is that lagging start where a small buff and vigilance are all it offers. That gap between floor and ceiling is exactly the design tension a snowball Equipment is built to create.