Viridian Emissary

The trade is the whole design: an attacker that wants to die. A 2/1 for two costs nothing to play and gladly throws itself into combat, because the death trigger replaces the body with a ramped basic, tapped, the moment it leaves. That recasts a chump block or an unfavorable swing as a resource conversion rather than a loss, and it sidesteps the usual problem with sacrifice-for-value ramp dorks: there is no activation cost, no mana sunk, no sorcery-speed window to find. It dies however it dies (block, burn, board wipe) and the land arrives anyway. The constraint that keeps it honest is the order of operations. The land enters tapped, so the acceleration is always one turn behind: you commit the creature, it trades, and only then does the mana show up, untapping on your next turn. That delay holds it short of true mana-dork speed; the body has to die before the ramp pays out, which is the price for getting the value for free. This is the aggressive cousin of the sacrifice-ramp lineage, built to attack into a board it cannot profitably attack into and come out ahead either way, the green answer to how a cheap beater stays relevant once the early turns have passed. The Phyrexian typing marks it as a soldier of a cause it does not survive, which is exactly how the card plays: it exists to be spent.