Risona, Asari Commander

A self-regulating attacker whose survival is bound to its own aggression: connect with a player and it earns a shield, take combat damage yourself and that shield is the first thing spent. The design encodes the samurai ethos as a mechanical loop, rewarding the player who keeps swinging and punishing the one who turtles up behind blockers. What's clever is how the indestructible counter both protects and paints a target: opponents who can't kill it in combat are pushed to remove it before it swings, or to make an unfavorable attack of their own just to strip the counter away. That second trigger, removing a counter whenever any combat damage hits you, means the shield is fragile in exactly the games where you most want it, when the race is close and both sides are trading blows. It caps at a single counter, so this is not runaway armor: it is a repeating gate that opens on offense and closes on defense. The result is a commander that wants to dictate the tempo of combat rather than react to it, a three-mana body with haste that would rather die pressing an advantage than survive holding one. Strip away the flavor and what remains is a wager on initiative, where the reward for controlling the battlefield is the durability to keep controlling it.