Alistair, the Brigadier

Historic as a build-around is the whole architecture here. The token trigger fires on every artifact, legendary, and Saga you cast, a wider net than it looks: a Bant deck already leans on legendary creatures and equipment, so the counting that would normally gate a token engine is instead a deckbuilding invitation to run permanents you wanted anyway. The passive half is cheap, incremental, always on. The active half is the opposite, and the seam between them is where the design lives. The attack ability scales off historic permanents you control, which is a pointed limitation once you look at what the first ability produces: those 1/1 Soldiers are ordinary creature tokens, not artifacts or legendaries or Sagas, so they add nothing to X. The engine that fills your board and the finisher that pumps it are counting different things. What powers the anthem is the artifacts, the legends, the Sagas you control, not the Soldiers themselves. The is the honest tax on that scaling: it is a heap of mana, and it arrives at combat rather than on cast, so the swing is a haymaker you assemble across a long game rather than something you flip on cheaply. The payoff is elegantly asymmetric. The tokens are the bodies that receive the +X/+X; the historic permanents you control are what determines how large it is.