Thelon of Havenwood

Saprolings were the throwaway tokens of early design, the 1/1 chaff that Thallid creatures spat out when you fed them spore counters. This Elf Druid quietly reframes the whole engine by attaching those counters to the wrong axis: instead of converting spores into bodies, it makes every spore a permanent +1/+1 on every Fungus on the battlefield, then hands you a graveyard-fueled way to pile them on en masse. The exile cost is the lever that keeps the loop from running away on its own (you have to spend dead Fungi to feed living ones), and it ties the deck's clock to how much fungal material has already died. That makes Thelon the rare lord that scales with attrition rather than presence: the longer the game grinds, the larger the recurring spore payoff, since the graveyard fills with exactly the resource the activated ability eats. It is the load-bearing piece of a tribe that, on its own, never quite cohered into a deck, the card that turns a pile of token-makers and saproling-fodder into an actual board state that grows. The static buff and the spore-loading activation are two halves of the same idea: one makes counters matter, the other manufactures them, and Thelon is the only card that does both at once.