Slippery Scoundrel

A binary card that lives entirely inside its threshold. Before you hit ten permanents it is a 2/2 that trades down to almost anything, its Ascend clause idling until the board is wide enough to pay for it; after, the same body turns into a threat with hexproof that can't be blocked, bundling two of the hardest things to do to a creature into one condition. The design detail that matters is that the transformation is a static state, not a triggered ability: the moment you control your tenth permanent, the city's blessing simply applies and the switch flips as a fact of the game state. There is no stack, no trigger to respond to, no window where an opponent can interpose an answer while the blessing lands. What you get is not an attacker that is hard to stop but one that a spot removal spell cannot legally target and a blocker cannot stand in front of. From that point the cleanest answers are a board wipe or non-targeting removal. The all-or-nothing shape is deliberate: inert until the game state it wants arrives, then a recurring source of damage that forces a sweeper. It hands patient, wide decks a closer whose value climbs as the board fills, rewarding exactly the long, permanent-hoarding game plan Ascend was built to encourage.