Feed the Clan

Lifegain has always sat awkwardly in constructed play because the body of life it buys rarely justifies the card slot: you spend a card to undo damage you already took, and the opponent simply deals it again. This one dodges that critique by tying its rate to a board state an aggressive green deck would happily be in anyway. With nothing on the table it gains five for two mana, a thoroughly mediocre line. With a single sizable creature in play the ferocious clause doubles it to ten at instant speed, and the deck that fields a power-four body early is precisely the heavy-creature green shell that has the tempo to spare and the burn-vulnerable life total worth protecting. The conditional does not ask for a separate enabler; it rewards the deck for doing what it already does. That structure is what keeps the card honest as a damage-race tool rather than dead weight: ten life at instant speed can flip a race in a single end step, but the toll for that ceiling is a board commitment the card cannot make on its own. It is the design idea ferocious was built to demonstrate, a payoff that scales with a battlefield you already wanted rather than one you have to assemble. Strip the creature away and it collapses back to a forgettable five-point gain, which is exactly the point: the ceiling belongs only to the decks that earned it.