Protocol Knight

The tap half is a Frost Lynx variant: a 3/4 body and a one-turn tempo swing folded into a common blue creature. The stun counter is the part that changes what the card can do, and it charges a tribal condition rather than mana. Control another Knight when this enters, and the tap stops being a one-turn inconvenience: the stun counter is spent on the target's next untap step, so the creature stays pinned when it should have come back. That is the quiet cruelty of stun counters as a mechanic. They kill nothing, so they slip past every answer a deck builds against the word "destroy," yet they still lock a blocker or attacker out of two combat phases while the counter and the missed untap cancel each other out. The enter-the-battlefield trigger fires once, so this is not a repeatable lever; it is a single front-loaded swing whose size depends on what else already sits on the board. A Knight shell turns a fair blue creature into something that reads as removal against an opponent who only prepared for destruction, while the honest baseline (a Frost Lynx that holds a blocker down for a turn) waits underneath for the games where the second Knight never arrives. The card is built around that gap: priced as a vanilla-plus creature, rewarded for committing to a shared type.