Thunderwolf Cavalry

Anthem effects usually broadcast their buff the moment they hit the table: a static bonus, a per-turn trigger, a payoff that treats your whole board as one number. This one gates the reward behind a connected swing, and it pays out in permanent counters rather than a floating boost. That distinction is the strategic axis. A static lord evaporates the instant it dies, dragging every point of its bonus off the board with it; the counters this drops onto the rest of your team are already spent by the time it leaves. Kill the source after it has connected twice and the two counters it placed on each other creature simply stay put: the buff is decoupled from the buffer. First strike does the deterrent work, not the pushing work. Without trample, any block (even a chump) eats the strike and denies the trigger entirely, so the ability rewards attacking into open air more than muscling through a wall. What first strike buys is a body most defenders will not step in front of at parity, which keeps those unblocked swings coming and the counters accumulating. Each hit that lands raises the floor of your board by one, compounding the pressure while quietly hardening a go-wide plan against damage-based sweepers and -X/-X effects: creatures grown past their printed toughness survive burn and wraths that would have caught them small. The design lives in the gap between a one-time swing and an accruing one, and once the counters are distributed they belong to the creatures wearing them, not to the engine that handed them out.