Sentry Bot
Most defensive creatures ask you to survive the attack first and rebuild afterward. This one is priced by the attack itself: the more creatures swinging at you, the cheaper it lands, so a wide alpha strike that would normally flatten a stalled board instead funds a flash blocker that arrives on the attacker's own turn. The flash is load-bearing, because the discount only exists while creatures are declared as attackers against you, and that window opens during a combat you did not initiate. The energy it banks on the way in scales off that same board state, then the combat-step payment converts the stored charge into a team-wide +1/+1 counter pump, quietly reversing the arithmetic that made the opponent's swing look good a moment earlier. It is a punish-card that reads the opposing tempo and turns aggression into a resource, a design that leans on the number of creatures attacking you to set both its price and its early payoff. The 2/5 body is the least interesting thing about it: a wall that walks the counters onto everything else you brought to the table.



