Jeleva, Nephalia's Scourge

The mana-spent clause is the whole engine, but it doesn't work the way greedy pilots wish it did: her cost is a fixed , so you cannot simply dump rituals into her cast to inflate the exile. The number that matters is the mana actually spent, which any tax or cost-increase on her casting can raise. Each time she enters, she scoops a slice off the top of every library, including your own, and stocks a personal vault. But the payoff is narrower than the exile is wide: the attack trigger only lets her cast an instant or sorcery from that pile, so a creature or artifact she strips off a rival's deck just sits there, denied to its owner but useless to her. The design tension lives in the timing: the attack trigger fires the moment she swings, not on damage, so she pays out the instant she turns sideways. Removal cast after blocks are declared can't undo the spell she has already flashed off her pile, which makes the gamble less fragile than it looks, while flying is the keyword that lets a 1/3 attack into a real board at all. What separates her from a plain recursion engine is the symmetry: every opponent feeds the exile pile too, so the spellbook she raids is partly stolen goods. She is among the earliest designs built entirely around casting other players' instants and sorceries for free, and the deckbuilding question she poses (skew hard toward castable spells, or accept you'll sometimes exile a Mountain and a tapland) is the one her pilots still wrestle with.