Skyshroud Ridgeback

A 2/3 for a single green mana is a body well ahead of curve, and the fade counters are the lease agreement attached to it. The math is blunt: you get the turn it lands plus two upkeeps spent stripping counters, and on the third upkeep, when there is nothing left to remove, the creature sacrifices itself. That counter is the lever that lets the cost sit far below what an evergreen 2/3 would command, converting a permanent into a rental. The keyword belongs to an early-era experiment in selling a discount up front and collecting the rent later: overstatted bodies on a self-destruct timer. What the design never solved is the structural flaw every fading creature shared. The early tempo can't be banked into anything that lasts; by the time the counters run dry, you have invested in a creature that walks off the board on its own. Green aggro wanted bodies that pressured early and stayed relevant late; this pressures early and then quietly leaves. The mechanic largely disappeared from later sets, supplanted by the cleaner vanishing template and by hasty bodies that at least let you keep what you paid for. As a snapshot of a balancing lever Wizards tried and retired, it is more instructive than it ever was playable.