Ancestor's Chosen

Built to reward a full graveyard, this is the rare lifegain payoff that scales with the game rather than the board. The enters-the-battlefield trigger pays one life per card in your yard, which means a seven-mana investment that does almost nothing on an empty graveyard and crests into double-digit gains in a deck that fills it. That makes the design a graveyard-as-resource statement wearing the clothes of a fair midrange body: the 4/4 first-strike frame is honest combat math, but the lifegain is the part that asks you to have spent the early turns milling, cycling, or trading creatures away. The pairing is deliberate. First strike on a 4/4 makes the body a stable blocker that survives the races lifegain decks tend to fall into, so the trigger and the keyword push toward the same plan: stabilize, then bury aggression under accumulated life. The number printed on the card is incidental; the real cost is structural, since you only get full value from a deck already committed to feeding its graveyard for other reasons. As a payoff it sits at the slow end of white's lifegain history, less a finisher than a reset button that buys back a turn of damage and leaves a creature that can hold the ground it just bought.