Dreamtide Whale

Three mana buys a body that has no business costing three mana, and the disappearing act is how the price is paid: two upkeeps of ownership, then it sacrifices itself. That would be a clumsy penalty on most creatures, but here it is the engine's fuel rather than its tax. The proliferate trigger fires on every player's second spell, so in a table where spells stack up the whale keeps adding counters to whatever you point it at, and one of the permanents accumulating counters can be the whale itself. Proliferate touches time counters, and time counters are exactly what vanishing runs on. Add one before an upkeep removes it and the countdown stalls; the creature that was built to leave keeps deferring its own exit. That loop is the design tension at the heart of the card: the same mechanic that limits how long you keep the body is the mechanic it hands you the tools to fight. Left alone it is a hard-hitting flash-in-the-pan; fed a steady diet of second-spell triggers it becomes a proliferate battery that also happens to swing for a large number, and every counter it distributes elsewhere (planeswalker loyalty, saga chapters, +1/+1 stacks, energy) compounds off a resource other players generate for you. The vanishing is not the drawback to route around; it is the axis the whole card turns on.