Hunting Moa

Echo turns a drawback into a value engine here. The trick is that the +1/+1 counter triggers both when this enters and when it dies, which means the echo clause stops being purely a cost: if you decline to pay, the sacrifice itself hands you a second counter. Play it, get a counter; let echo eat it, get another counter; or pay echo and keep a 3/2 body that still banked a counter on the way in. That symmetry between the enter and die triggers is what redeems echo from the punishing tax it usually is. Most echo creatures from this era asked you to pay full price twice for a body that landed a turn slow; this one builds the consolation prize into the failure state, so declining echo still leaves you a distributed counter for the sacrifice. The counter targets any creature, so it doubles as combat math, a reach to push something out of removal range, or fuel for whatever cares about creatures growing. It is a quiet piece of design that understood echo's central problem (you feel robbed when you pay, robbed when you don't) and answered it by making the sacrifice pay you back, a structural fix that later +1/+1-counter payoffs would lean on without the echo scaffolding.