Copper-Leaf Angel

Five mana buys a 2/2 flier and an ambition: feed your lands into the activated ability and the body grows by one counter for every land you sacrifice. The exchange rate is brutal in its honesty. Each counter is permanent, but so is the loss; the lands are gone whether the Angel lives or dies, and there is nothing here to protect the investment. No haste means the counters cannot stabilize the turn you commit. No protection means a swollen body still falls to any removal that does not check toughness, leaving you down a creature and down a manabase. That is the whole trade laid bare: an arbitrarily large flier on top, your future development underneath, and a sacrifice cost that asks you to spend the one resource constructed decks guard most jealously. The land-payment experiments of this early era leaned on this premise repeatedly, treating mana sources as expendable ammunition rather than the engine of the deck, and they mostly settled into the curio shelf for exactly that reason. The math only pays off if you have already won the long game elsewhere, at which point you did not need an Angel that eats your lands to do it.