Shah of Naar Isle

A 6/6 trampler for four mana with an echo cost of zero looks like a creature you keep for nothing. The catch is the symmetry tax wired to that payment: settling the echo lets each opponent draw up to three cards. The trigger fires once, at the upkeep after the Shah comes under your control, and that single window is where the design lives. Let the echo go unpaid and the body evaporates like any echo creature whose cost is ignored. Pay the zero and you keep a genuinely large beater at a discount the era never otherwise offered, but you have just handed every opponent a fresh grip of cards. That one-time decision is the whole tension; the upkeep that costs no mana is the most expensive thing about owning it. The card sits with a handful of red fatties whose stats are deliberately overtuned and then leashed by a self-correcting drawback, the same balancing instinct behind cheap creatures that give an opponent some compensation for the rate. The clever part is the substitution: most echo creatures ask whether the body is worth a second payment in mana, while here the body is paid for in your opponents' card advantage, a cost that scales with how many players sit across from you and what they can do with the draw. The mana is free; the resource being spent is everyone else's hand size.