Specimen Freighter

The threshold is the whole contract. Below nine counters this is inert furniture: no body, no blocking, no attacking, just a bounce trigger you already cashed on entry and a Station line waiting to be fed. That entry trigger is the tempo down payment, a two-for-one that returns non-Spacecraft creatures to hand and resets an opponent's board while you build toward the flip. The build is Station itself, the mill-flavored payoff designed around the grind. Tap the creatures you control at sorcery speed and each one loads charge counters matching its power, converting board presence that would otherwise be swinging into fuel for the 9+ line. Cross it and the slab wakes up as a 4/7 artifact creature with flying that mills four every time it attacks a defending player, a resilient evasive clock that closes through the library rather than the life total. Note the timing: the mill fires on attack declaration, not on damage, so it lands even into a chump block and even if the creature is removed mid-combat. The tension lives in the arithmetic. The counters have to be assembled from your own bodies, not cast in, so present pressure is what buys a future win condition, and the game has to hold together long enough for that trade to pay off. This is a design that prizes inevitability over speed: the longer the game runs, the harder the repeated four-card mill bites, and the more the early bounce reads not as tempo but as a stall bought on credit against the flip.