Liliana's Mastery
A Zombie lord that pays its own entry fee. Most tribal anthems ask you to already have a board before they do anything: drop one into an empty battlefield and you have spent five mana on a buff for nothing. This design sidesteps that by shipping two 2/2 Zombies with the cast, which the anthem immediately promotes to a pair of 3/3s. You are paying for the bodies and the static bump in one purchase, so the card never arrives dead, and every Zombie you add afterward inherits the +1/+1. The cost of that convenience is tempo. At five mana it resolves a turn or two after a Zombie deck wants to be pressing its advantage, and because the anthem lives on an enchantment rather than a creature, it slips past creature removal but crumbles to anything that answers enchantments. The reward structure points toward width rather than height: the +1/+1 compounds across a swarm, and the two tokens matter most in a deck already flooding the board with disposable undead. It is a go-wide payoff built to sit at the top of a curve full of cheaper Zombies, cashing the anthem in only once the horde is deep enough to justify the rate.
