Melira's Keepers

The single line of text is a declaration of war on one specific keyword conflict. This is a 4/4 for five whose entire reason to exist is the refusal of counters of every sign: no -1/-1 from wither or infect, no charge or fade counters, but also none of the +1/+1 counters green so often wants to pile on. That symmetry is the conceit. The card is named for Melira, the figure who personally negated the era's poison plague, and it inherits her function as a walking firewall: a creature that wither and infect simply cannot diminish, sized to trade up against the very attackers those keywords were built to enable. Where wither and infect deal damage as -1/-1 counters rather than as ordinary damage, this body shrugs the entire mechanism off, then swings back at a clean four. The price of that armor is that the same clause shuts the door on green's own growth toolkit; any deck leaning on counter-based pumps to scale its creatures gets nothing here. So the design lands as a narrow piece of hate stapled to a vanilla beater: most compelling as a record of a specific mechanical rivalry, less so once that rivalry is off the table. The body is honest, the text is pointed, and the whole thing reads as a thematic answer to a problem it was built alongside.