Earth Kingdom General

Earthbend is the mechanic that makes "your lands are your army" cheap enough to build around, and this is the piece that welds the animation to a payoff. The entry trigger promotes one of your own lands into a 2/2 body that keeps its mana ability, so the counters buy a threat without asking you to draw a separate creature. That is the first half. The second half reads those counters right back: any turn you add +1/+1 counters to a creature, including the two this card hands your freshly animated land, you may gain that much life, once per turn. The interlock is the design. Earthbend feeds the counters, the counters feed the life clause, and the whole engine runs off resources you were already spending anyway. The once-each-turn cap is what keeps the lifegain from ballooning: you bank the life on the single biggest application rather than every trickle of counters across a turn, which pushes the deck toward one large earthbend or growth spell instead of a flood of small triggers. The return-tapped rider on the animated land is the safety valve, so trading your grown land in combat costs tempo but not the mana source. Built as the green anchor for a counters-and-lands shell, it wants a board where growing your creatures and padding your life total are the same action.