Greenbelt Rampager

A 3/4 for a single green mana reads like a misprint until you find the real cost buried in the enter trigger: the body is paid for not in mana but in energy, a resource your deck has to be generating somewhere else. The elegant part is the failure clause. When you cannot cover the energy tax, the creature does not die or sit tapped; it returns to your hand and refunds a single counter, so a deck swimming in energy lands it for one mana while a deck still building toward a payoff casts it repeatedly, banking one net counter at a time. That recurring mode is the design's real wrinkle: the card is an energy battery you can flicker through your hand, each cast netting just enough to keep the loop from generating something from nothing. Crucially, the choice is not yours at resolution. The trigger is mandatory, but it demands two energy at once: you need a full reserve to keep the elephant, and anything short of that (an empty pool, or even a lone leftover counter) sends it back with the one-energy refund. That all-or-nothing threshold is what keeps the loop honest, because the moment your deck can pay the pair, it must, and the body stays put. The generous frame is paid for in deckbuilding, in how much energy infrastructure you commit before this is reliably a one-drop instead of a slow drip-feed bounce engine. It rewards precisely the resource it consumes, which makes it a thermostat for an energy deck rather than a standalone beater.