Karlov of the Ghost Council

Lifegain in the abstract has always struggled to justify itself: the life points rarely convert to board presence or pressure, so the strategy stalls as a defensive shrug. The fix here is to make every increment of life into stored removal. Two counters per gain trigger, six counters per exile means three life-gain events buy the unconditional removal of a creature, and the exile clause matters: no death triggers, no regeneration, no recursion off the affected creature. The counters do double duty, sizing up a 2/2 into a real threat while the deck waits for the next thing worth exiling. The build coheres around volume of small triggers rather than a single large lifeswing: soul-warden effects, blink loops, and lifelink bodies each tick the engine forward, so the design rewards a wide base of cheap incremental gain. The friction is that spending the counters resets the threat clock, so each exile is a real choice between a bigger body and a cleaner board. That tension between accumulation and expenditure is the whole design: it asks you to decide, repeatedly, whether the creature in front of you is worth the counters you have banked. The body itself is almost incidental; the value is in how it converts a passive resource the game usually treats as inert into a renewable, color-locked answer that punishes anything worth exiling.