Ursine Fylgja

Damage prevention banked as a resource is the whole conceit here: the four counters it arrives with are a stored buffer of "prevent the next 1 damage" charges, each spent one at a time at instant speed to walk the 3/3 through combat or a burn spell unscathed. The bear effectively reads as a creature that can soak up to four points before it ever takes a mark, and the activation tops the reservoir back up whenever you have mana to spare, so the body is harder to kill the longer a game grinds. That math runs into the era it came from: spending counters one at a time against attackers that hit for more than one is a slow, fiddly trade, and the recharge cost makes the loop expensive to keep humming. The prevention shields the bear and only the bear, never your face or your other creatures, which caps the defensive ceiling at a single durable blocker rather than a board-wide wall. It is a study in how counter-based damage prevention behaves more like a depletable life total bolted onto one creature than like the flat regeneration or shroud effects that usually keep a midrange beater alive: granular, exhaustible, and refillable, but always one point at a time.