Basalt Gargoyle

Echo defines this gargoyle, and the arithmetic is harsher than the upfront price suggests: now, again on your next upkeep, six total across two turns for a 3/2 flier you already control. The deferred cost was one of those designs that let a creature undercost its first turn in exchange for a tax later, and red got a version that asks little and returns little. What sinks the keep-or-release decision is timing. Echo triggers on the upkeep immediately following the turn the creature arrives, and because the gargoyle has no haste it cannot attack before that bill comes due. So there is no clean tempo line where you swing once and let it die to echo; the body has to sit through a return trip to your upkeep before it can do any combat work, which means the second installment falls due before it has earned anything. Decline to pay and you have spent three mana for a creature that never untapped to attack. The toughness pump is the small lever red leaves you afterward: a way to dump leftover mana so the gargoyle survives a combat step or a point of burn, inching toward a 3/X that can hold a flank. None of it adds to much, and it was never meant to. It is a modest, honest expression of the deferred-cost idea: cheap to deploy, expensive to keep, with just enough self-preservation to make the keep-or-release choice real.