Deep Forest Hermit

Every temporary token-maker has to solve the same tension: the payoff arrives all at once and then wants to leave. Vanishing 3 sets a three-turn clock, and the enters-the-battlefield trigger drops four Squirrels the moment it lands, so the body itself is almost incidental. The 1/1 is a delivery mechanism for a wide board that arrives as four 2/2s the turn it hits (nine power across five bodies once you count the Hermit) and hangs around after the Hermit ticks down to nothing. That's the structural trick. The +1/+1 for Squirrels is a static effect tied to the creature, so it lasts only as long as the Hermit does, which means the smart line is to lock the anthem in somewhere permanent (a token doubler, a mass pump, a sacrifice engine that cashes the bodies for value) before the last time counter comes off and the buff evaporates. What makes it more than a one-shot go-wide payoff is that it's built to be reused: flicker it, bounce it, reanimate it, and each entry is another four bodies. Among the handful of Elves that generate Squirrels, this is the one that treats the tribe as a real go-wide engine rather than a cute aside. The vanishing clause is what prices the four-token, board-anthem package at five mana instead of open-ended value; the card is engineered to be squeezed for everything in a narrow window, then discarded or recycled.