Hancock, Ghoulish Mayor
The tension here is that undying and +1/+1 counters want opposite things. Undying only fires if the creature has no +1/+1 counters when it dies, so the more +1/+1 counters you pile on to feed the tribal buff, the less likely the recursion clause is to trigger. The card is built to make that its own strategic dial: the anthem scales with counters, undying rewards having none, and the player decides moment to moment which half is worth more. As a lord it reads unusually because it pumps only Zombies and Mutants, a pairing that fits a plane of ghouls and irradiated survivors, and because the pump is variable rather than a flat +1/+1. Come back from undying and Hancock returns as a 3/2 handing out a single point across the board; stack +1/+1 counters through other means and the anthem grows while the safety net quietly disappears. The Zombie-and-Mutant scope is narrow enough that the card wants a deck built around one of those types rather than splashed into any counters shell, and the interplay between the two abilities means the pilot is always weighing resilience against reach.
