Phantom Nishoba

The trick is that survival is counted in instances, not in points. The body arrives as a 7/7 with trample, but each counter pays for an entire damage event rather than a quantity of damage: one point or twenty, any single instance is prevented in full and costs exactly one +1/+1 counter. That inverts the usual math of killing a creature this big. A lone burn spell for twenty prevents the whole twenty and spends a single counter, accomplishing almost nothing. Grinding it down the damage route means seven separate hits across seven separate windows, a genuine project. The lifegain runs the other direction: every point it connects for refunds to your life total, so a clean swing pressures the opponent and pads the cushion the prevention shield is slowly drawing down. This counters-as-instances frame defined a run of Phantom creatures from the same era, and the Nishoba sits at the top of that curve. The wrinkle worth knowing is what walks past the shield entirely: destruction, sacrifice, and exile ignore the counters and the prevention clause, killing it without spending any of the seven instances the damage route demands. Removal that does not deal damage is the clean answer; anything that does is stuck chipping one counter per event.