Sage of Hours

A 1/1 that promises infinite turns is a strange object to hold in your hand, and this one delivers on the promise if you can get there. Heroic banks a +1/+1 counter every time you cast a spell targeting the creature, and the activated ability trades counters back at a rate of five per extra turn, with no ceiling written anywhere on how high the stack can go. Ten counters buys two turns, twenty buys four, and past that the game stops functioning as a game. So every protection spell, every pump spell, every cheap targeted cantrip you own wants to point inward, building toward a threshold instead of toward combat. The counterweight is how much can go wrong before the lever gets pulled: a 1/1 telegraphs the whole plan, dies to any removal, and because heroic requires a spell that actually targets it, a well-timed kill spell in response leaves the counters unmade and the turn unbought. The remove-all clause punishes sloppy counting, too, since it wipes every counter but only converts clean multiples of five: dump eight and three of them vanish for nothing. It is the rare creature whose ceiling is "I take the rest of the turns" and whose floor is "I cast a spell on my own 1/1 and it got Doom Bladed," with almost nothing habitable in between.