Nine Lives

A prevention enchantment built like a bomb with the timer running toward your defeat. Damage aimed at you is prevented outright, but each source that would hit you drops an incarnation counter: one counter per source, not per point, so a burn spell prevented to zero and an unblocked 8/8 each cost exactly one tick. The ninth counter does not reward you for surviving: it exiles the enchantment, and that departure fires the clause that hands you the loss. So the object is not to reach nine. The object is to sit somewhere below nine indefinitely, absorbing hits for free while the total creeps toward a threshold you are trying to freeze rather than fill. That inverts how prevention usually reads: instead of a shield you deploy and forget, this is a shield wired to detonate on its own success, where an aggressive opponent is not draining your life total but stacking charges on a fuse. Hexproof is what keeps it durable against interaction, since opponents cannot target it to switch it off; their outs narrow to untargeted removal, sweepers that sweep enchantments, or simply racing you to the ninth prevention. Your own outs are just as narrow, because any effect that moves it off the battlefield (a bounce, an unplanned wipe, a sacrifice) reads the same leaves-the-battlefield trigger and kills you. Two clocks run at once: your life total, and a counter total you spend the whole game trying not to complete.