Vrestin, Menoptra Leader
Two X-scaled effects for the price of one, and both build the same board. The counters go on the creature itself; the tokens arrive alongside as a swarm of flyers, so a single X payment splits into a fat threat and a wide one at once. What ties the halves together is the attack trigger: every Insect you swing with, the token brood included, grows by a counter each combat, so the board does not just get bigger when it enters, it snowballs every time it turns sideways. Most go-wide token payloads leave that seam open, making bodies and then needing an outside anthem to matter; this one is its own anthem, self-contained, and the counters it hands out are permanent rather than a temporary combat pump. The 0/0 printed body is load-bearing here too: without X, the creature dies to state-based actions the moment it resolves, so the mana investment is not optional flavor, it is the whole card. The shared Insect typing on both the leader and the tokens is what closes the loop, keeping the leader inside the same lord effect it produces. It reads as a straightforward counters-and-tokens payload, but the elegance is in how few words it takes to make one X count three times.
