The War Doctor

A payoff built on two of the least-loved corners of the rules text: phasing out and exile. Most cards treat both as byproducts, incidental states that happen on the way to a real effect. Here they are the fuel directly. Note the batching in the triggers: any number of permanents phasing out at once yields a single time counter, and any number of cards hitting exile simultaneously yields a single counter too. So the engine rewards frequency, not volume, favoring a build that spreads its phasing and self-exile across many separate events rather than one big blowout. The clever half is what those counters do on the attack: damage equal to the count, with a redirect that converts any lethal hit into an exile instead of a death. That closing clause matters more than the raw number, because it sidesteps everything a graveyard-relevant board wants from a dying creature (no death triggers to bank, no recursion to loop, no bodies to reanimate), and it feeds back into the first ability, since exiling the target is itself another exile event to count. The 3/5 frame is deliberately unthreatening: this is not a beater but a battery that wants to survive combat and grow, rewarding a build stacked with cheap phasing effects the way another deck might stack sacrifice outlets. The design reframes two mechanics usually kept in separate boxes as a single resource, and the reward for feeding both is a burn engine that doubles as graveyard hate on legs.