My Followers Ascend

Five +1/+1 counters that never go away, stapled to flying and vigilance that vanish at end of turn: the split personality is the whole point. The counters make for a real, permanent upgrade to a creature you control, but the keywords last only through the turn you set the scheme in motion, so the payoff is a single alpha strike that clears blockers and still stays back on defense. That assumes you kept a body alive against three opponents pooling removal, which is the exact assumption a multiplayer table exists to violate. The fallback clause is the more honest read of the design. If you control no creatures (the spot a hunted player tends to land in after a focused-fire turn), the scheme instead hands you a 4/4 colorless Scarecrow with vigilance: not a haymaker, but a floor that keeps the flip from doing nothing. That either/or hinge, keyed entirely to whether the table has already stripped you clean, is the mechanism. And since a scheme goes to the bottom of the scheme deck once its trigger resolves, the value is front-loaded: the counters persist, but there is no repeated engine, no lingering enchantment, just the one burst of stats-and-keywords or the consolation body. It patches the design problem that dogs any board-dependent scheme, which is looking dead the moment your board is gone, by refusing to whiff when you have nothing left.