Black Carriage
A 4/4 trampler for five mana was already a fair body in its era, but the design is built around a tax that turns the rate into a recurring cost. The creature stays tapped by default and only untaps if you feed it: sacrifice a creature during your upkeep, and it stands ready for the turn. That sacrifice clause is the whole engine. It frames the body not as a beater you cast and forget but as a furnace you have to stoke every cycle, which means the card wants a steady stream of expendable bodies behind it (tokens, chump fodder, anything you would rather convert into trampling damage than keep on the table). The upkeep-only timing on the untap is the constraint that keeps it honest: you commit the sacrifice before combat is even a question, so there is no holding the creature back as a surprise blocker or untapping it in response to removal. It is a thoroughly Gothic piece of design, the carriage that runs only on what you throw into it, and the mechanical loop matches the morbid flavor exactly. The card asks a real deckbuilding question that most vanilla fatties of the period never did: do you have the fodder to keep paying, turn after turn, for a body this size?
