Exemplar of Light

Lifegain has always wanted to be a payoff engine, and the trouble is that most lifegain triggers fire so often they either overpower a cantrip or underpower anything bigger. The fix here is a throttle written into the second ability: gaining life stacks counters as fast as your triggers land, but the card only cashes one of those counter-events into a draw per turn. That single restriction is what lets the growth stay ungated while the card advantage stays sane. So a soul-warden trickle turns into a slow-motion threat that grows every combat, gets in the air, and still refills your hand exactly once a turn regardless of whether you gained a point or a hundred. It is a design that rewards width of lifegain sources without ballooning into a combo that draws your deck: the counter accrual is uncapped, the card flow is metered. The result reads less like an aristocrats finisher and more like an anchor for a life-matters midrange plan, where every incidental point does double duty as a body upgrade and a scry-free replacement card. The evasive frame matters too, because a creature that grows and draws needs a way to convert that inevitability into damage before the board stalls; flying is the closing valve on an engine that would otherwise just sit there getting large.