Thicket Elemental

Pay the kicker and the enters trigger turns the cost cap off entirely: it cares only about landing one creature, however far down the deck it has to reach. The misses shuffle back rather than going to the bin, which means there's no thinning to bank on; what seven mana buys is two bodies in one turn, no more. That self-correcting reveal is the elegant part of the design. A flat dig effect would fizzle on a deep miss or leave the rejects scattered, but here the depth of the reach is irrelevant to the payoff, so the variance lives entirely in what you hit, not in how long it takes. The trade is creature density. You don't choose what surfaces, so a deck stuffed with expensive bombs can hand you the very thing you most wanted to skip the cost on, while a creature-light shell can blow through half its library and turn up a lone mana dork. The body underneath is a fair 4/4 you can play early when you're short, then graduate into a fatty-cheating engine once you're flush. It expresses a particular thesis about kicker from the era when the keyword was new: the bonus should reward grinding a long game into a mana surplus, not accelerate the early turns. The honest price is a board commitment most decks won't make, which is what it costs to put a free creature into play.