Vug Lizard

The echo mechanic was Urza's Saga's attempt to discount creatures up front and collect the rest the following turn, and it almost never paid off on bodies that lacked an immediate impact. This is the textbook case of the discount meaning nothing: both halves of the cost are identical, so a 3/4 with a conditional evasion clause asks you to spend the same six mana you would have spent on a vanilla beater, just split across two turns and gated behind a sacrifice clause if you blink. Mountainwalk compounds the problem by being among the narrowest evasion red ever printed; it does nothing against the green, white, and blue decks that would actually want to block a midsized attacker, and it goes dead the moment the defending player isn't running anything with the Mountain subtype, which includes nonbasic duals and shocklands as readily as basics. What the card illustrates, decades on, is why echo in its original split-payment form was retired and never revived: it punished tempo decks for casting their own threats and rewarded opponents for simply attacking into the upkeep window before the echo was paid. Vug Lizard is the clean demonstration of that math going wrong, a creature whose printed cost misrepresents what it actually demands at the table.