Blech, Loafing Pest

Lifegain payoffs usually cash out once: a drain, a trigger, a threshold crossed. This one turns every increment of life into permanent board growth, and the trick is in the breadth of what it counts. Pests are the obvious tribe (the token-and-sacrifice creatures that come bundled with lifegain hooks), but the reach into Bats, Insects, Snakes, and Spiders is what makes the effect more than a one-tribe payoff: it stacks counters across a wide swath of the small-green-black creature pool, the kind of go-wide board that already leans on incidental life. The counter is per-creature and cumulative, so a deck that gains life in dribs and drabs (a lifelink attacker, a fetch-triggered drain, a repeated small gain) compounds a whole battlefield rather than pumping a single threat. That distinction matters: the ceiling is set by how many qualifying bodies you can hold, not by how much life you gain in a single burst. At three mana for a 3/4, the body is durable enough to sit in the middle of the curve and survive the early trades a token deck wants to make, which is the point: it is a payoff that needs the board already built around it, not a standalone threat. The design leans hard on tribal overlap, betting that the five creature types it names show up together often enough to make a single lifegain trigger feel like a board-wide anthem.