Burnt Offering

A ritual that runs on a corpse, and one of the cleaner expressions of black's "everything is a resource" thesis than any straight life-payment burst. The math is the whole pitch: pay one black mana, feed it a creature, and get that creature's mana value back split however you like between black and red. The key word is value, not cost. The spell pays out on the printed mana value of the body sacrificed, regardless of what it actually took to put that body on the board, which is precisely where the card stops being a fair accelerant and starts being a combo enabler. Reanimate a fatty, cheat something in for a fraction of its cost, or cast a creature with built-in reduction, then convert its full mana value into a profit you never paid for. The output flexibility is the other wrinkle: most rituals of this era handed back a fixed pile in one color, while here the black-red split is yours to assign, which positions the card as connective tissue between two stages of a combo line rather than a pure burst of acceleration. Instant speed matters too, since it can sacrifice a creature in response to removal and turn an evaporating threat into fuel for whatever comes next. The body is the battery and the spell is the discharge; the rate only ever works as well as the engine that loads the battery in the first place.