Icatian Moneychanger

A loan, modeled as a creature. The design conceit is purely economic: you take 3 damage up front (the principal, paid immediately) in exchange for a body that accrues a credit counter every upkeep and can be cashed in for life equal to the total. The card enters with three credit counters already on it, so the loan's starting balance exactly matches the damage you took, but the sacrifice clause is locked to your upkeep, and that timing restriction is what keeps the whole interaction honest. Because the creature is cast in your main phase, you cannot collect the turn it lands; the earliest cash-out comes on a later upkeep, where holding through the upkeep trigger lets the counters grow past three and the loan finally turns a profit. That same window denies you the instant-speed escape hatch: you cannot react to a lethal swing by liquidating at the last moment, so the value lives entirely on a timeline you plan around rather than exploit, and an opponent who removes the creature before an upkeep voids the debt entirely. The 0/2 body underlines the point. This is not a creature you play to attack or block; it is a counter that happens to be a permanent, sitting on the board advertising exactly how much life it is worth. It belongs to a strain of early white design that treated life total as a resource to be deliberately spent and rebuilt, an idea the game returned to later with far more elegance but rarely this blunt about the interest rate.