Tigra, Feline Fury

The design bet here is that flash on a two-drop rewrites the tempo math of a lifegain deck. Most lifegain payoffs are proactive: you play the engine, then spend turns paying it off. This one arrives at instant speed, which means the growth clock starts the moment you want it to and not a turn before, and it turns any lifegain trigger already on the stack into an ambush. Hold it up during your opponent's attack, gain life off a soul-warden effect or a lifelink block, and a 2/1 becomes a 3/2 with trample that they walked into. The trample keyword is the piece that makes the counters matter offensively rather than defensively; a growing body without evasion stalls behind a single chump, but every +1/+1 counter here converts directly into extra damage over the top. The base body is the price you pay for that flexibility: a 2/1 folds to almost anything before it grows at all, so the flash timing is doing double duty, letting you deploy into open mana when a removal spell is less likely to be sitting ready. It is a payoff built to be held, not led with, and the whole shape of it (cheap, evasive, reactive, snowballing) is a compact answer to the question of how you make incremental lifegain close a game instead of merely extending one.