Hamlet Vanguard

The payoff scales off a board you already committed to building. A tribal Human deck that has flooded the battlefield gets a lord-sized threat that arrives out of nowhere, since every other nontoken Human you control adds two counters rather than one: a middling early board translates into a genuinely large body, and a wide one produces something that ends games. That doubling is the aggressive lever, and it rewards going wide before it rewards going tall. The 1/1 printed body is the honest tell that this is a payoff, not an enabler; cast it into an empty board and you have a creature that dies to a stiff breeze. Ward protects the investment. A card whose whole value lives in a stack of counters is exactly the kind of thing that folds to a single removal spell, so the tax makes an opponent pay real mana to answer the swing they saw coming, which in a tempo-driven aggro plan often means letting it live a turn too long. This is a classic tribal-count payoff in the mold of the lords and finishers that pay off a full board: cards that ask you to have already done the work before they hand you the reward, with the counter-doubling giving the reward a steeper curve than most.