Cradle Guard

Echo is a pricing trick, and this Treefolk wears it cleanly: the body lands a turn early, the bill arrives a turn late, and the two payments together come out to exactly what an unconditional trampler of this size would have cost up front. The discount is a fiction. What the card actually sells is timing. You get a blocker or an attacker now and owe full retail next upkeep, which makes it worth casting only when an extra body this turn outweighs the mana you give back the next. The friction lives entirely on that delayed payment. A flat overcost is paid once and forgotten; echo asks you to find the cost on a specific upkeep, and a tapped-out turn or a plan that shifts overnight turns a rate-neutral trade into a forced sacrifice. That second-upkeep decision is what separates the mechanic from a creature that simply costs six. Trample on a Treefolk is the flavor doing its work: a walking wall that hits back rather than just standing in the way. But the cleaner takeaway is structural. This is an early-era two-turn pricing experiment stripped to its bones, the version where the mechanic changes nothing about the rate and everything about when you pay for it.