Aku Djinn

A 5/6 trampler for five mana would have been a fine beater on rate alone in its era; the upkeep clause is the design statement, and it is a punishment, not a benefit. Every turn you keep this Djinn alive, you hand your opponents counters across their whole board: a self-imposed ticking liability that grows the very army meant to block you. The mechanic only makes sense as a tension engine. The body is large enough to demand an answer, and trample means it keeps connecting through the swelling blockers it just created, so the card is a race against a clock you wound yourself. It rewards a deck built to close fast or to remove the inflated threats your opponents are accumulating before they overwhelm you. This is bargain-with-a-cost design from a period when Wizards leaned hard into drawback creatures: a generation of fatties that came cheap precisely because they actively helped the opponent. Aku Djinn is one of the purer expressions of that idea, since its drawback is not a one-time tax but a compounding gift that scales with how long the game runs. The flavor lands too: a bound spirit whose imprisonment strengthens its captors the longer it is held.