Ageless Entity

Lifegain has always struggled to justify itself: the life you bank rarely cashes out into board presence, so the strategy stalls at "I'm not dead yet" without ever becoming "I'm winning." This is green's answer to that complaint, a creature that converts incidental lifegain directly into permanent size. The triggered ability doesn't care how the life arrives (a lifelink rider, a steady Soul Warden drip, a painless tap-land), so it turns a deck's accumulated gain into a clock rather than a comfort blanket. The counters stick, which is the design choice that does the work: this is not temporary swelling that resets at end of turn but a body that ratchets up over a game and stays there. That makes it a payoff piece, a creature that demands a lifegain engine feeding it and translates the output into damage. The conversion problem (how stored life becomes a board) is the tension lifegain has always carried, and most payoffs answer it with a one-time burst or a static buff. This one answers with a creature whose power and toughness are a running total of every point gained while it sits on the battlefield. The catch is in that clause: the trigger only counts life earned after it lands, so the swelling starts at zero each time the creature enters, and a removal spell wipes the accumulated counters and forces a rebuild from the base 4/4.