Rift Elemental

Time counters are usually a clock you wait out: suspend a spell, watch it tick toward zero, then cash in whatever you parked there. This reads that clock as ammunition. Every counter you strip is a resource the game was already metering out, converted into a temporary swing of power for a single attacker. The wrinkle is that it scans sideways across the entire time-counter mechanic rather than off one card: it doesn't care whether the counter sits on a suspended spell, a vanishing creature, or a permanent that carries them for some other reason, so it taps the whole class as a fuel supply instead of a single engine. And there is a genuine cost buried in the activation. Pulling a counter off your own suspended spell speeds it toward casting, which sounds like upside, but it forces the question of timing: cracking the clock early commits you to handling whatever resolves sooner, while pumping a fragile body that has to survive combat to matter. The body itself is incidental; the design lives entirely in the conversion rate between stored time and combat damage, and in who controls when that stored time gets spent. This is one of the more literal expressions of "time as a resource," a conceit the era leaned into hard: a creature whose whole job is to burn the clock early rather than let it run its natural course.