Dearly Departed

Here is a creature whose best work begins after it dies. A 5/5 flier for six is a fine top-end body in a tribal aggro shell, but the line that matters reads only from the graveyard: while it sits there, every Human you control arrives a size larger. That inverts the usual cost calculus. You are not trying to keep this card alive; you are trying to trade it away, mill it, or simply let it get blocked, because the anthem effect needs it dead to function. The counters it grants are real, permanent +1/+1 counters rather than a static buff, so they survive the Spirit being exiled later and stack with other counter synergies, but they only land on Humans that enter after it reaches the yard, meaning sequencing rewards a board you build outward from a dead anthem rather than around a living lord. Few cards apply the graveyard-as-resource idea this cleanly to a tribal payoff: a lord that asks to be a sacrifice, a 5/5 evasive threat whose flavor as a watchful ancestor maps exactly onto its mechanics. The tension it resolves is how to give a Human deck a recurring buff that cannot simply be killed off the board, and the answer is to put the engine somewhere removal usually does not reach.