Keldon Vandals

The artifact destruction fires the moment this enters, and it fires whether or not you ever pay the echo: that is the quiet point. The value half is settled on resolution. Everything after that is the player deciding whether the 4/1 is worth a second investment. Echo turns the Shatter-on-a-body template into a budgeting decision rather than a free roll. Keep the creature and you owe the following upkeep, which means the second turn of pressure is never free. That deferred bill is what justifies the rate. A 4/1 stapled to artifact removal would be undercosted if you got to keep it for nothing, so echo functions as a tax you can decline: let it die once the artifact is gone and you have paid only for the destruction, or commit again and convert it into a real clock. The payment also reshapes how the card sequences against your hand, since the upkeep cost competes with whatever else you wanted to develop that turn. None of this is fast: the body has to survive a turn before it can swing, and the echo demand lands before the first attack. That delay is the cost of building a creature this cheap and this disruptive, and it is exactly what keeps the whole package from being a strict upgrade on plain artifact removal.