Cleric of the Forward Order
The lifegain scales off a single variable: how many copies of itself you already control, and it counts the one entering. The first gains two life on its own; the second arrives to a board of one and pays four; a third or fourth resolution launders six or eight life into play on a 2/2 frame. That self-referential clause is build-around-by-quantity in its purest form, an effect whose entire ceiling lives in the multiplier. It shares a structural trick with the cards that count creatures of their exact name (Relentless Rats is the archetypal one), except the payoff here is a lifegain spike rather than a swelling body. The reward is incremental and additive: nothing about a lone Cleric of the Forward Order bends a game, and everything about a stack of them does. Even the first copy is not a vanilla bear, since two life rides along with the body, but the gulf between one and four of them is where the design actually lives. What the card is honest about is its own arithmetic: it does something modest in isolation and something genuinely warping only when chained, the redundancy lever white commons of this era reached for. It asks you to commit to its name many times over, and refuses to do anything dramatic until you do.
