Phantom Nomad

Damage prevention is usually a one-shot fragility, but the Spirit cycle from Judgment turned it into a clock. Each point of incoming damage gets fully prevented, and the cost is a counter: the body shrinks from a 2/2 to a 1/1 to nothing, but only ever loses one counter per damage event regardless of how much damage that event would have dealt. That is the wrinkle the whole cycle is built on. A single counter absorbs a Lightning Bolt as cheaply as it absorbs a 1/1's bite, so the creature trades up against burn and big swings while bleeding out against repeated small hits. It also means the standard math of combat does not apply: blocking a 5/3 costs exactly one counter and one removed point of toughness, leaving a survivor, and any effect that returns counters to it (proliferate being the obvious modern lever, though this predates that keyword) resets the meter. The phantom mechanic was a clean answer to a recurring white-aggro problem, namely how to make small creatures resilient to removal without simply making them bigger; the counters are both the life total and the body, and watching them tick away is the entire texture of playing one. Of the cycle, this is the plain-bodied member: no evasion, no trample, just a Nomad whose only job is to keep coming back to the same combat and surviving it once more.