The Aetherspark

The design tension here is that a planeswalker and an Equipment want opposite things from the battlefield. A walker is a standalone permanent your opponents attack down; an Equipment is a rider that lives on a creature and shares its fate. This one refuses to pick a side. Unattached, it behaves like an ordinary four-loyalty walker with a ticking-up loyalty engine and two payoffs worth building toward. Attached, it becomes a different object entirely: it can't be attacked, so the usual clock-the-walker plan evaporates, and its loyalty stops depending on the +1 and starts feeding directly off combat damage the equipped creature lands on your turn. The +1 does double duty, either strapping the card onto a fresh threat or growing the one it already rides, and every point of combat damage that connects buys you more counters toward the payoffs. The two ultimate-tier abilities read as ordinary card advantage and a mana burst in isolation, but the attached mode changes how fast you reach them: a creature with any evasion turns a single unblocked hit into a loyalty windfall, collapsing the multi-turn arc a walker's minus usually demands. That is the wrinkle worth sitting with. Loyalty on a planeswalker is normally a resource you spend down and defend; bolting it to a body reframes it as a resource combat generates, and the card's whole identity lives in that inversion.