Uktabi Efreet

A 5/4 for four mana is undercosted for the era, and cumulative upkeep is the tax that pays for it: the first turn after it lands costs one green, the next costs two, the third costs three, and the arithmetic compounds until the green floats out from under you and the Efreet sacrifices itself. The design intent is a body that hits the table beating face above the curve, then sets a clock on its own owner. That makes it a tempo proposition rather than a long-game creature: you are buying a window of cheap beats and accepting that the window closes on a schedule you can see coming. The mechanic is what dates the card. Cumulative upkeep was the era's preferred lever for pushing a stat line past its rate without making it a permanent fixture, and it threads the needle by front-loading the value: the age counters are negligible for the first few turns, then become a green-mana hemorrhage that a fair deck cannot sustain alongside everything else it wants to do. Read that way, the Efreet is less a creature you keep and more a creature you cash in, an aggressive opener whose self-destruct clause is the whole point of the bargain.