Betor, Ancestor's Voice
Most lifegain payoffs and most graveyard payoffs live in different decks, because the deckbuilding tension between "stay alive and grow" and "die and come back" pulls in opposite directions. This design refuses to pick a side: it turns the day's lifegain into growth and the day's life loss into reanimation, in the same end step, from the same body. The counters clause rewards the Abzan lifegain lines you already wanted to run, while the reanimation clause rewards the drain-and-sacrifice half of the same colors, cashing in the life you spent on Phyrexian mana, painlands, and life-payment effects for creatures returning to the battlefield. That symmetry is the whole point: an aristocrats deck bleeding itself for value and a lifegain deck padding its total both feed the same engine, so the two archetypes Abzan has always split between finally answer to one card. The flying, lifelink body is not incidental either; the lifelink feeds the +1/+1 half of the end-step trigger directly, so attacking is itself part of the loop rather than a separate plan. What keeps it from running away is timing and scale: everything resolves once, at end of turn, sized to exactly what happened that turn, so a passive board does nothing and the payoff is only ever as large as the life you were willing to swing.
