Aerith, Last Ancient
Green-white recursion has always leaned on the body being expensive or the loop being narrow, but here the engine runs off a resource the color pair already generates for free. Lifelink stapled to a 3/5 turns every combat and every incidental gain into fuel, and the Raise trigger tiers off how much life you found: a single point buys back a creature to hand, seven or more slings it straight onto the battlefield. That gap between the two tiers does the load-bearing work. Gaining a point is trivial (attack once), so the hand-return floor is almost free; the seven-life gate is where the card asks for real investment, rewarding a deck built to burst rather than trickle. It reframes lifegain from a defensive stat into a recursion clock, a job green-white rarely gets to do with a single card. The trigger checks at your end step and returns any creature card, not a specific type or cost, so the ceiling scales with whatever the graveyard holds: a mana dork on a low-gain turn, a game-ending threat on a high-gain one. Lifegain decks have historically wanted a payoff that does something beyond padding a total, and this converts the number you were accumulating anyway into board presence; the two-tier structure means even the turns you fall short of seven still advance you.
