Radiant's Dragoons

The five life arrives the turn it lands; the bill comes due the turn after. Echo turns this into a deliberately front-loaded transaction: you pay four mana, gain five life on the enter trigger, and then the upkeep tax asks whether the 2/5 body is worth a second payment or whether you let it go and walk away with the lifegain already banked. That second question is the whole design. Echo was Urza's Legacy's experiment in discounting a creature's first turn against a deferred cost, with most of the cycle pricing the echo to match the cast cost so the real rate was double. Here the enter trigger is structured to pay out immediately and irrevocably, which means the sacrifice clause never claws back the value you came for. A defensive 2/5 that gains five life for one four-mana investment is a fair stabilization piece; choosing to keep it for a second four-mana investment is rarely the point. The card reads as a four-drop with a steep upkeep, but it functions as a one-shot life buffer that happens to leave a wall behind if you feel like paying for the wall. That separation, between the part of the card that resolves once and the part that recurs as a tax, is exactly the lesson echo was built to teach: not every cost on a creature has to be paid to get what you wanted from it.