Throne Warden

A 2/2 that turns the crown into a defensive investment: every end step you still hold the monarchy, it grows, and the pile of counters raises the price anyone must pay to take that crown away. The loop is elegant because the accrual is conditional on a status you have to actively defend. Combat is what threatens the monarchy, and this creature exists to make that combat unappealing, since the same swing that would dethrone you now has to punch through a body that has been fattening itself turn after turn. Stay ahead and it snowballs; lose the crown and the trigger simply goes dormant, its "if you're the monarch" condition unmet, leaving whatever size it managed to reach frozen until you reclaim the throne. There is no catch-up mechanism baked in, which is the point: the reward is for the player already winning the crown fight, not the one clawing to get it back. This is a deliberately multiplayer-flavored engine, a card that only fully expresses itself when several players circle the same prize and every counter it accumulates recalibrates the math of who is willing to attack whom. The trigger sleeps and wakes with your grip on the monarchy, which makes the creature less a threat in itself than a running scoreboard of how long you have kept the crown.