Llanowar Sentinel

An early experiment in self-replication on a creature, built around the gimmick of finding copies of itself by name rather than producing token bodies. The structure is a chain: each Sentinel that enters offers to pay for the next, so a single copy can cascade into a board of identical Elves as long as the library holds more and the mana keeps flowing. That payment is what turns a 2/3 body into a scaling mana sink: the "put onto the battlefield" clause means the fetched copies skip their casting cost and pay only the search tax, while the optional lets you dump excess mana into more bodies. The engine throttles on resources rather than running away: you can only chain as far as your remaining named copies allow, and every link costs another , so the board fills at the rate your library and lands permit. Searching by exact name was the era's blunt instrument for tribal and copy-matters effects before templating grew more elegant, and Llanowar Sentinel is a clean specimen of that approach: a creature whose payoff is finding more of itself, gated by how many you brought along.