Exalted Dragon

A six-mana 5/5 flyer was a perfectly reasonable rate when this came out, and the drawback is the whole point of the design: the attack tax turns a clean beater into a body that costs you a land every time it swings. The framing matters. This isn't a card that pays you to sacrifice lands; it's a card that taxes you for declaring it as an attacker, and the cost is paid at the worst possible moment, after you've committed to combat. A 5/5 flyer that strips your mana base one card per turn is a sundial: it tells you what time it is by counting down. The clock runs both ways, because every attack accelerates your own decline even as it pressures the opponent. Where the design gets interesting is in lands you don't mind losing, or lands that want to die: sacrifice fodder that already has a second use makes the tax read as a feature rather than a penalty. The card sits in a small family of self-sacrificing white fatties whose drawbacks were meant to keep evasive bodies honest before evasion got cheap, and it reads now as a snapshot of an era when a 5/5 flyer was strong enough to deserve a leash this heavy.