Inspirited Vanguard

Counter-based creatures live with a structural flaw: they concentrate value into one body, and a single removal spell erases the whole investment. Endure is green's answer to that flaw, and this 3/2 gets to answer it twice, once as it enters and again the moment it is declared as an attacker, before combat damage or even blocks. Load it with +1/+1 counters and it becomes a five-drop that outgrows most of what it meets, escalating on its own attack schedule. Take the 2/2 Spirit token instead and the same trigger turns into a hedge: a second body that walks away from the removal spell aimed at the vanguard. The soft 3/2 base is doing deliberate work here. It invites an answer, and answering it before it can attack costs the opponent a card while the payoff has barely begun. The real texture is that the choice never locks. Against a removal-heavy opponent, the Spirits build a wide board no single spell dismantles; into an empty battlefield, the counters race. Green rarely gets to re-litigate the tall-versus-wide question across a whole combat sequence rather than at one point of commitment, and that repeatability is the point: a one-shot enters-the-battlefield payoff pays once, while this asks the question again every time the creature is sent in. Any single trigger reads as modest. What matters is the accumulation across a game where the creature keeps getting to swing.