Phantom Wurm

The printed power of 2 tells the whole structural story: the body lives entirely on its counters. Those four +1/+1 counters do double duty as both stat line and life total, because any damage that would touch this creature is prevented and paid for by shedding a single counter instead. A 2/0 base means the counters are not a bonus on top of a creature; they are the creature. The result is a blocker that no single instance of damage can kill outright: a burn spell, a combat hit, a ping each remove one counter and leave the body standing, slowly whittled down rather than struck dead. That makes it a frustrating wall for aggressive decks that lean on incremental damage, and a poor target for any removal that deals damage in a lump. The Phantom mechanic this belongs to was an experiment in turning toughness into a renewable resource, trading the cliff-edge of a damage threshold for a staircase of counters; the trade-off is that anything bypassing damage entirely (destroy effects, sacrifice, -X/-X) ignores the protection completely and answers it at full value. The body grows or shrinks only through what spends those counters, so pump and proliferate effects read very differently here than on a normal creature: they are not just buffs but additional lives.