Ghitu Slinger
Deploy the body, deal two damage to anything on the way in, and then face a single choice on your next upkeep: pay the echo cost to keep a 2/2, or sacrifice it and treat the whole thing as a three-mana removal spell that happened to leave a creature behind for one turn. That two-stage structure is the entire design. The damage trigger is the reason the card exists; the body is a deposit you can either reclaim or walk away from. Rather than pricing an enters-the-battlefield ping at a clean front-end rate, the design taxes you on the back end with a one-time deferred payment that comes due the upkeep after the creature lands. The wrinkle is that the sacrifice clause, which reads as a penalty, becomes a lever. Blinking, reanimating, or otherwise returning the creature to the battlefield retriggers the damage, so a deck built around flicker or recursion converts a one-shot burn spell into a repeatable one and turns "this creature wants to leave" into the point. Echo as a mechanic largely vanished from later design, which makes this a fossil of a brief era when Wizards balanced enters-the-battlefield value not by raising the cost up front but by attaching a delayed second payment the player could choose to default on, exactly once.


