Revered Unicorn

Most cumulative upkeep creatures from this period rot in your hand of resources: you keep paying a climbing tax to hold an effect that decays as the bill grows, and the counters that pile up are pure dead weight. This one tries to flip the ledger. Every age counter that drained mana out of you converts into a point of life when the Unicorn leaves the battlefield, which means the sacrifice you'd normally dread becomes a discharge. The catch is in the math: cumulative upkeep climbs while age counters only tick up by one. Keep the Unicorn alive through three upkeeps and you have spent six mana (one, then two, then three) to bank three life. The payout never catches the cost, so the lifegain reads less as a reward than as partial salvage on a tax you were already paying. The body is a fair 2/3 for two, doing nothing to subsidize the loop. What makes the card legible is that early-design instinct to give the upkeep payment somewhere to go: turn the cost of keeping a permanent around into life when it departs, an idea white would return to with cleaner rates later. The departure clause is broader than a death trigger, too: bounce or exile cashes the counters just as a sacrifice would. The result is a curiosity of its moment, a creature that asks you to bankroll your own future lifegain across several turns and never quite breaks even.