Waning Wurm

Vanishing solves a problem black usually answers with a stat penalty or a drawback stapled to the body: how do you sell a 7/6 for four mana without warping the curve? Here the discount is paid in time, not in toughness or upkeep tax. The wurm arrives with two time counters and summoning sickness, so the math is colder than the size suggests: it enters, sits out a turn, ticks to one counter on your next upkeep and finally swings, then ticks to zero on the following upkeep and is sacrificed before you ever reach combat again. One attack, no choice in the matter. That single guaranteed swing is the whole contract if you leave it alone. The counter clock is also what makes it a flicker-and-bounce target in disguise: every time it leaves and re-enters, it comes back with a fresh pair of counters, so a way to blink or return it buys another lap before the sand runs out and converts a self-destructing beater into a renewable one. The vanishing keyword itself is a color-shifted import, time-counter mechanics that had previously lived in blue and red grafted onto a fat undead body; seeing the clock on a black bruiser was the point of the era's "what if this color did that" experiment. Untouched, it is a fragile, single-strike threat that demands you close before the timer expires. Built around, it is a recurring body at a rate the size should never allow.