Thalia's Lieutenant

The lord that grows itself. Most tribal anthem creatures hand out a static buff and stay the size they were printed; this one runs a counter-based feedback loop in both directions. Its entry pays every other Human on the board a counter apiece, and from then on each new Human that follows drops a counter onto the Lieutenant itself. The distinction from a static lord is that these are permanent +1/+1 counters, not an anthem that switches off: the swarm keeps its size when the Lieutenant dies, and any counters it has accumulated survive a wave of damage-based or -X/-X removal that would have caught a stationary 1/1. The sequencing rewards both directions rather than favoring one line. Cast it late into an established board and the enters-trigger spreads counters across the whole team at once, which can act as a finisher on a full board; cast it early with the board still building and it collects a counter for every Human that lands behind it. Human as a creature type spans every color, giving the Lieutenant an unusually deep pool to feed on compared to lords locked to one narrow tribe, and the payoff scales with how wide and how fast that pool deploys rather than with any single large threat. It is the synergy piece that converts a low, dense curve of Humans into a fast clock without asking one card to carry the plan alone.