Pest Mascot

Golgari's lifegain-into-counters payoff, and the design is doing something quieter than it looks. Most lifegain rewards in black-green have historically triggered off a single burst: gain some life, draw a card, or drain the table once. This one converts the frequency of lifegain into permanent size, so a stream of small triggers matters more than one large gain. Each lifegain event is a discrete trigger, which means an incidental one-life gain does the same structural work as a big swing: the counter lands either way. That reframes what you want out of a lifegain shell around it, favoring density of triggers over magnitude. Trample is the piece that keeps the growth meaningful; a creature that only gets wider without evasion stalls against a single blocker, but a body that keeps accumulating counters and pushes the excess through turns every incidental heal into clock. The Pest creature type ties it to a small tribal thread of black-green tokens and sacrifice value, though the card leans on the lifegain axis rather than the Pest one. What balances it is the modest starting body and the fact that it does nothing on an empty board: it needs a lifegain engine already running to become a threat, so it reads as a payoff piece rather than a standalone one.