Sacred Mesa

A token engine with a self-destruct timer welded to its core: the upkeep clause forces you to feed it a Pegasus every turn or watch the whole enchantment fall apart. That tension is the entire design. The activated ability builds an army of fliers two mana at a time, but the upkeep tax claws one back, so the card only nets value when you can pump enough mana to make more than you sacrifice in a single cycle, or when you have a sacrifice payoff that turns the upkeep cost from a liability into an engine. The recursive constraint is what gives Sacred Mesa its reputation as a build-around rather than a value piece: it does nothing on its own except threaten to die, and rewards anyone who can either flood mana or convert the forced sacrifice into damage, life drain, or some other dividend. It is one of Mirage's clearest examples of an enchantment that prices its own upkeep as a deckbuilding puzzle rather than a passive bonus, the kind of self-cannibalizing token producer that would be reconsidered many times over but rarely with this much friction baked directly into the maintenance step.