Foul Spirit

Evasion this cheap should not exist in a starter product, so the design pays for it with the bluntest tool in the kit: cast the Spirit, lose a land. The sacrifice falls on entry, the moment you can least afford it, and it never relocates. There is no clause that aims the loss at an opponent, no way to recur the land later, no conditional escape hatch buried in the second line. You get an evasive body that hits harder than your stalled mana base should allow, and you pay for it by stalling that mana base on the spot. That flat, unconditional tradeoff is the whole lesson of the Portal-era drawback: power gets rationed to newer players through costs they can read once and understand completely, not through the conditional triggers and stack interactions the contemporaneous expert sets were busy exploring. Later design would dress this same instinct up with finer print: echo billed you on the upkeep, suspend made you wait, kicker let you choose. Foul Spirit states the deal without ornament. The body is good; the land is gone.