Saproling Burst

Fading turns the clock into a resource here, and the whole design is built around spending it twice. The seven fade counters are simultaneously the enchantment's lifespan and its token-generation budget: every Saproling you crack off costs a counter, which means every body you make hastens the day the enchantment dies. That coupling is the elegant trap, and it folds back on itself in a way that punishes greed. Because each token's power and toughness track the counters that remain, the size of the Saprolings is not locked at creation: every token on the board shrinks in lockstep as you spend counters, so they are always the same size at any given moment, and that size only ever decreases. The math has a hard floor: pop the seventh and final counter and every token becomes a 0/0 simultaneously, the whole board dying at once. The most you can hold without outside buffs is six 1/1s, all of them shrinking together. The guillotine waits at the end: once the enchantment is gone, every token it made dies with it and can't be regenerated, so the army you assembled was always borrowed against a deadline. The puzzle is tempo versus mass. Pop counters early for a wider, frailer board, or hold them to keep the bodies fatter while the fade clock ticks regardless. Either way you are managing a depreciating asset, not building a permanent one: power that arrives with an expiration date already stamped on it.