Lead-Belly Chimera
A creature designed to feed a bigger version of itself, which is the joke and the friction in equal measure. The sacrifice line targets any Chimera, and the granted trample exists to upgrade Chimeras that lack the keyword (or Changelings, which copy the type wholesale); it is a real piece of the design, not a wasted clause. But on copies of itself the math is what the card is really chasing: two of these collapse into a single 4/4, three into a 6/6, each step costing a 2/2 you already paid four mana for. The friction is in that price. Four generic mana for a 2/2 whose payoff requires a second four-mana 2/2 to point it at is a steep rate even in a slow era, and the build-around demands a critical mass of a creature type that almost nothing else in the era cares about. Self-referential artifact creatures whose abilities only function in multiples read as clever combos until you count the mana to assemble them: a payoff that exists only in duplicate. What survives the rate is the cleaner half of the idea, an indefinite counter that outlives the body granting it, a sacrifice-into-permanence pattern that later cards would attach to far better-priced bodies.
