Vanguard of the Restless

The anthem is metered by an unusual counter: not the number of Spirits you control, not mana spent, but how many times you've cast your commander this game. That ties a tribal payoff directly to the escalating tax that commander-centric decks pay anyway. One cast makes it a plain +1/+1 anthem, so your 1/1 tokens become 2/2s while this grows to a 3/3; by the fourth and fifth cast a wide board scales into lethal reach without adding a single body. The design folds what is usually pure friction (that climbing tax) into a power source that gets louder the longer a game drags on.

The recursion clause is what keeps the lord on the board through that grind. Every Spirit that enters offers a buyback: pay and this returns from the graveyard, so a wrath or a chump block does not permanently cost you the anthem. That builds a natural loop with sacrifice fodder and token generation, where each new Spirit is both a body under the buff and a rope pulling the buff itself back onto the battlefield. The result is a Spirit-tribal engine tuned for the recast-your-commander archetype: a lord whose size floats with a counter your deck is already accumulating, wrapped in a resilience package that makes it stick, and given flying so it can carry that scaling buff into the air.