Soldevi Simulacrum

A 2/4 colorless body for four mana would have been unremarkable even by the standards of its era, which is precisely why cumulative upkeep is bolted to it: the keyword is Ice Age's signature tax mechanic, a self-escalating cost that starts at one and climbs by one each turn the permanent survives. The design logic is a slow-burn lease rather than a purchase. You get an early artifact creature that anyone can run, with a firebreathing pump ability to make the 2/4 punch through, but the rent compounds until paying it eats your whole turn. Eventually you let it go, by design. That is the structural pressure valve that justified printing a colorless blocker with an offensive mode: the body never threatens to be a long-term engine, because the upkeep guarantees a sacrifice date the moment your mana stops scaling faster than the age counters. The pump ability sharpens the tension further, since spending mana to attack is mana not spent on keeping the thing alive next turn. Cumulative upkeep as a whole did not survive as an evergreen tool; it produced too many board states where players quietly forgot to add age counters, and its math punished durdling in a way that aged poorly. This card is a clean specimen of the experiment: a colorless creature whose only real cost is the one that grows, asking you to extract value before the lease runs out.