Varina, Lich Queen

Most tribal payoffs reward you for having more creatures on board. This one rewards you for the attack itself, and it pays in three currencies at once: the draw-discard clause turns a Zombie swing into card selection, graveyard filling, and lifegain scaled to how wide you go. That triple output is the design tension the card resolves. A Zombie deck wants bodies in the yard, wants to keep drawing gas, and wants to survive the retaliation of a go-wide plan, and this attack trigger does all three off the same combat step. The discard is not a downside here so much as fuel: the second ability turns those cards back into tapped Zombie tokens, so the loop feeds itself. Loot away creatures too big to recur cheaply, exile pairs from the yard, rebuild the board, attack again. The tapped clause on the tokens is the friction that stops the engine from generating pressure the same turn it generates bodies, which keeps the payoff honest against a symmetrical mana investment. What makes the design sit right is that the reanimation-adjacent effect is folded into a color trio (Esper) that has always owned graveyard value, and the commander turns that shared identity into a single self-sustaining machine rather than a pile of good stuff. She is less a threat to answer than a reason the whole deck functions, and that is a harder thing to design than a big body with a keyword.