Charmed Stray

The joke is the payoff and the payoff is the joke: a lifelinking one-drop whose only reach beyond its own body is to buff other copies of itself. This is a common built entirely around the four-of-a-kind fantasy, a card that rewards you for accumulating multiple Charmed Strays and does nothing extra when it enters alone. As a design it belongs to a small tradition of self-referential nametag effects, where the card's text points at its own name and the incentive is to stack duplicates rather than assemble a supporting cast. The counters are permanent and the trigger only fires on entry, so the payoff scales with sequencing: the last cat down finds the biggest board, and every earlier copy grows only as the next arrives. Lifelink on a 1/1 is nearly cosmetic in isolation, but on a widened team of grown counter-fattened cats it turns each attack into a real life swing. What looks like filler is actually a narrow build-around wearing two abilities lightly (a keyword and an ETB trigger), engineered to make the improbable "I have three of these" game state feel deliberate rather than accidental.