Mycoid Shepherd

A four-mana 5/4 that triggers off its own qualifying body is the design knot worth pulling at here. The lifegain clause keys on power 5 or greater, and the Shepherd itself clears that bar, so it pays you the moment it trades or chump-blocks: the card is its own first trigger, not a payoff that sits idle until you build around it. Most death-payoff designs leave the engine piece doing nothing until you supply fodder; this one comes with the fodder attached. The floor is a beefy attacker that bleeds value when removal points at it, and the ceiling is a board of large creatures each handing you five life on the way out. The body carries the whole design: hexproof or evasion would be greedy on a creature whose pitch is dying profitably, so it stays a near-vanilla frame with one big upside bolted on. The five-life chunk is deliberately fat, enough to swing a race against aggression but gated behind creatures actually dying, which keeps it from rewarding decks that never want to trade. It asks for a critical mass of large bodies and a willingness to throw them into combat, turning attrition into a slow life cushion rather than a combo. A clean piece of green-white midrange engineering: an attacker that makes dying part of the plan.