Norwood Priestess

The cheating-creatures-into-play engine, built before the Portal sets were supposed to have one. The activation window is the whole story: the ability fires only on your turn and only in the pre-combat window, so anything dropped onto the battlefield this way normally arrives summoning-sick and cannot swing the turn it lands unless it has haste. That single timing clause is the balancing friction. Without it, a 1/1 that puts a fatty into play for free every turn would be a constructed-defining ramp engine; with it, the priestess asks you to survive a full turn cycle before the payoff matters, and asks the opponent to kill a fragile body before it ever taps. The other piece of discipline is color: the ability cheats out only green creatures, which keeps it tethered to the things green wants to do (oversized bodies, mana acceleration) rather than splashing into the artifact and blue payoffs that broke later free-spell engines. It does the work a sorcery-speed reanimation or a ramp spell would do, but folds it onto a repeatable creature, paying for that repeatability with a 1/1 frame and a strict clock. The Portal Second Age line was nominally a teaching product, which is what makes a card this structurally powerful read as such an outlier: the template is plain, written in an aggressively simplified rules vocabulary, but the engine underneath is the kind designers usually reserve for higher-rarity, fully-templated sets.