Fungus Elemental

A growth engine throttled by two compounding restrictions, and the second one is the interesting design choice. The first is the fuel cost: every counter eats a Forest off the battlefield, so the body grows by mortgaging your own mana base, a tension that worked in the era when Llanowar Elves and Land Tax let green decks treat lands as semi-expendable. The second restriction is the timing clause: the pump can only fire on the turn this creature entered. That window collapses the entire arc into a single turn rather than a slow accumulation, a sharply different design from the cumulative-counter creatures of the period. With no haste, the 3/3 cannot attack the turn it lands, so the choice is never about swinging bigger that turn: it is purely about how large a permanent body you want to bank before the door closes. You cast it for four, then spend whatever Forests and green mana remain to inflate it, knowing next turn the option is gone for good. It asks you to treat your land like a one-shot resource rather than a permanent one, but it gives you the full turn's worth of mana to do it. The math is steep (each Forest buys two power off a 3/3 base), so the ceiling is real but the floor is whatever you can afford the moment it resolves. This is green's early experiment with sacrificing permanents for stats, the kind of high-friction rate that later green growth cards smoothed away.