Rogue Elephant

The trade is the entire design: deploy an oversized green beater on turn one, then sacrifice a Forest to keep it. That clause fires the moment the creature enters, before you can untap or replay anything, so the tempo cost is front-loaded and unavoidable. You land the body but you are a full land behind the turn it resolves, an inversion of green's usual ramp relationship: instead of spending a creature to find land, you spend land to field a creature. The requirement that the sacrifice be a Forest specifically, not any land, is the quiet leash on the rate; it punishes the greedy multicolor manabases that would otherwise abuse a hyper-efficient threat without paying green's tax in mono-green parity. What it represents is one of green's earliest experiments in the downside-aggro template, the structural bargain that hands over a permanent resource for an undercosted threat, the same trade later one-drops would refine with discard, life loss, or self-mill. Here the currency is land itself, the resource green prizes most, which makes the elephant both a statement about what green is willing to spend and a clean early test of how far a body can outrun its own tax.