Quest for the Gemblades
The reward is steep enough to look broken on a spreadsheet: four +1/+1 counters for two mana up front is a payoff most pump enchantments would never offer. The entire balancing act lives in the trigger. Quest counters only land when one of your creatures connects with another creature in combat, which means this asks for blocks or attacks into bodies, not the open-air swings green aggro actually wants. You earn the fuel by trading punches, then spend a counter (and the enchantment itself) to dump the payload. By the time the quest is charged, the board state that charged it has usually changed: the creatures that traded damage may be dead, the race may already be decided. That gap between when the engine arms and when it fires is the friction the rate is paying for. The sacrifice clause is the other restraint, turning a repeatable-looking enchantment into a one-shot grenade. It rewards a deck full of first-striking attackers that can win combats without dying, then cash a single overwhelming counter-dump to push lethal or stabilize a clogged ground. The quest-counter mechanic was a recurring early-era experiment in front-loading a cheap permanent that pays off later, and this one sits at the aggressive end of that line: the ceiling is enormous, but only a board built to win combats in the first place ever gets there.
