Squad Captain

The scaling here rewards the exact deck least inclined to spend five mana on a payoff. A wide token board turns this into a genuine finisher, arriving as an enormous body with vigilance so it can attack without leaving itself unable to block; a board of one or two creatures hands you a middling beater for the price of a real one. That inversion is the tension the card is built around: it grows with your commitment to the battlefield, but by the time your field is wide enough to make it huge, you rarely needed another attacker to close. What redeems that gap is how the counters recalculate on re-entry. Blink or bounce it and it does not shrink back to base; it re-counts your creatures when it returns, so a field that has grown even wider between casts gives it a fresh, larger pile of counters. That turns the fragility of counter-based sizing into an asset for any deck running flicker effects, since each trip through the exile zone is a re-appraisal rather than a reset. It is a payoff that pays out only once your board has already done the heavy lifting, sizing itself off work the rest of your creatures did, and one that grows more threatening the more you can send it away and bring it back.