Coal Stoker

Cast it the honest way and the four mana you spent comes back as three red, leaving a 3/3 on board for a net of one and a refilled pool to keep the turn going. That cast-from-hand clause is the entire balancing act: flicker it, reanimate it, or otherwise put it onto the battlefield without casting it from hand, and the trigger looks for a hand-cast it cannot find, so the ritual half never fires. A creature that refunded its mana through any route would anchor every cheat-it-into-play shell; tying the rebate to a hard cast turns it instead into fuel for storm-style turns, where the body is incidental and the burst is the payoff. It plays as a delayed ritual that happens to leave a blocker behind, which is a strange and specific niche: most rituals are pure velocity that evaporate, and most bodies cost tempo to deploy. This one wants to be the fourth or fifth spell of a turn that keeps going, the moment a deck commits its hand and the mana mostly comes home. The 3/3 is sized for exactly that role, big enough to trade or pressure, small enough that nobody is paying four for the stats. The rare ritual that asks nothing of your graveyard or your library and everything of your hand's willingness to empty itself in one turn.