Thornfist Striker

Infusion is the mechanic's tell: this is a lord that stays dormant until you have gained life in a given turn, which reframes the whole card as a lifegain payoff rather than a standalone anthem. That conditional does the balancing work. A 3/3 for is a reasonable body on its own, and Ward means opponents cannot cheaply pick it off before the lifegain half of the deck comes online, so the tax buys the time you need to satisfy the condition. While it holds, the team gets +1/+0 and trample, and the trample is the piece that matters. A lifegain-Elves board tends to go wide with small green bodies, exactly the kind of board a single blocker can gum up; trample turns that width into damage that carries past the chump instead of piling up harmlessly. The design keeps the anthem honest by gating it behind a resource the deck already wants to accrue, so it asks you to sequence lifegain before the swing rather than attacking first and mattering by default. It belongs to a line of green creatures that reward a specific board texture instead of buffing unconditionally, but the lifegain hook makes it narrower and more directed than a generic pump lord: build the engine, and it converts an incidental life total into a closing punch.