Zuko, Conflicted

The genius of this design is that the cost is fixed but the payoff is exhausting itself. Each turn you pay two life to advance one rung of a four-step ladder, and the four rungs are deliberately front-loaded with everything you want (a card, a counter, an extra red mana) and back-loaded with the thing you don't: on the fourth and final trigger, with no other mode left unchosen, you hand Zuko to an opponent. There is no way to opt out and no way to repeat a mode. The clock is baked into the card itself, which is a rare thing: most engines ask you to build the drawback around them, but here the self-destruct sits on the same slip of cardboard as the value. That inversion is what makes the two-life-per-turn tax read as escalating rather than trivial. The first payment feels free; the last one costs you the creature. Structurally it belongs to the small family of "you must choose, once each" designs where the modal list is a countdown rather than a menu, and it pushes that idea further than most by making the terminal choice actively hostile to its controller. The counter mode means you can grow the 2/3 into a real threat across those three profitable turns, which only sharpens the tension: the more you invest, the more painful it is to eventually give away.