Elvish Vanguard

The Elf tribal plan splits its payoffs in two directions, and this is the go-tall half. Where a static lord spreads its bonus across the whole swarm and stays small itself, this turns the same flood of one- and two-drops into a single escalating threat: every Elf that follows it onto the battlefield is permanent size on one body. The counters are the durable part. Five triggers leave a 6/6, and that size lives in +1/+1 counters no destroy effect can peel off. The fragility is the cost. It arrives as a 1/1, the smallest creature on the table, and a single removal spell in response to the first trigger erases the whole investment before any math accrues. Because it grows only when another Elf enters after it is in play, the timing matters: drop it before the swarm rather than after, then let each subsequent Elf bank a counter, and you can start the engine the same turn by casting a cheap Elf alongside it. The deeper tension is that the counters sit on a body that does not share their resilience. The same Wrath of God that mows down the swarm feeding it kills the Vanguard outright, no matter how many triggers it has banked; it survives a sweeper only against damage-based or -X/-X effects, and only once it has grown past their range. It scales with how much of the Elf plan you commit after it lands, which makes it both the reward for staying on the swarm and the first thing the swarm's enemies want gone.