Dai Li Agents

The entrance clause does two jobs at once: it seeds counter-bearing bodies and it builds a manabase that can swing. Earthbending twice turns your lands into 0/0s with haste that immediately survive as 1/1 creatures still tapping for mana, and each carries the +1/+1 counter the drain cares about. That drain is the payoff: X equals the number of creatures you control with +1/+1 counters on them, so every earthbent land is a point of life lost and gained the moment this swings, and the count scales upward as other cards pile counters onto the board. The return rider on earthbend is worth reading closely, because it limits the engine rather than protecting it: an earthbent land that dies or is exiled comes back as a fresh land object, tapped and stripped of both its counter and its creaturehood. Removing one costs you a body and a permanent point of drain; the land survives, but the reach does not. That asymmetry keeps the life-swing from spiraling untended. The 3/4 body is deliberately modest, because the card anchors a counters-matter shell rather than beating down on its own. Golgari has long wanted a clean way to convert a wide incremental board into life-swing reach, and hanging the drain on an attack requirement (instead of an upkeep or an activated ability) forces the deck to keep committing to combat to collect, which keeps the payoff honest against a purely defensive plan.