Brutal Deceiver

The two activated abilities split this Spirit into two players sharing one body: the one who pays to scout, and the one who pays to fight. Both ride the same fiction (a creature staring into the unwritten future of your library), but they pull against each other, and that friction is the whole design. Paying buys pure information: it shows you the top card without disturbing it, telling you whether the second ability is worth firing before you commit mana to it. The reveal is the payoff, but it pays out only when a land sits on top, turning a 2/2 into a first-striking 3/2 for the turn, a genuine roadblock in a slow ground stall. Because the reveal is an activated ability capped at once per turn and live only on lands, this Spirit treats the unseen card as a combat resource rather than a draw. You cannot rearrange anything: you look, then choose whether the top is worth revealing for the buff or worth leaving alone so the next draw matters more. That is the tension. A deck stuffed with lands keeps the trick reliably online but draws fewer threats; a leaner deck rarely flips the bonus when it counts. As a body built around a small repeatable edge rather than raw stats, it belongs to a grindy, attrition-minded strain of red that the color was rarely trusted with in this design era.