Skyshroud Behemoth

Ten power and ten toughness for seven mana is a rate no fair green creature of its era came close to, and the entire bill is paid in time. Fading 2 means the giant enters with two fade counters, and your upkeep strips one each turn until none remain, at which point you cannot pay and must sacrifice it: three of your turns at most. It also enters tapped, so the turn you cast it the Beast does nothing, unable to swing or block. The clock is the whole point. This is a beater you rent rather than own, built to close a game inside a window so narrow the drawback only stings if things drag out. The tension worth noticing is that everything about the card pushes you to cash it in on your own terms before the counters run dry, which means it sits more naturally alongside the era's sacrifice payoffs and recursion than inside a curve-topping plan you cast and forget. The sacrifice clause is the key: it sends the Beast to the graveyard rather than letting it leave the battlefield cleanly, and that residue is what gives the green giant something to build around. Vanishing, fading's later cousin, runs the same upkeep countdown and ends in a sacrifice too; the difference is procedural, vanishing forcing the sacrifice the moment the last counter is removed rather than the turn you run out. What reads as a pure drawback is really a fuse you light deliberately, the sacrifice timed to feed whatever payoff you have stitched around it.