Pili-Pala

Read the activation straight and it loses you mana: pay , get one back, fall a mana behind every time. The trick is the untap symbol buried in that cost, which lets this rock untap itself as part of paying for its own ability. The one-use-per-turn ceiling that limits ordinary mana rocks simply does not apply. The value lives in the filter (any color out) and in what happens when an outside effect taps Pili-Pala for more than two mana between activations. That is the loop. The canonical partner is Grand Architect, which taps an untapped blue creature for . Pili-Pala is a colorless artifact creature, so Grand Architect first spends to turn it blue, taps it for two colorless, then Pili-Pala spends that two (untapping itself in the process) to make one mana of any color and present a fresh untapped body for the next tap. Net it out and two permanents make infinite mana of any color. The design is quiet by construction: a flying Scarecrow that fixes colors reads as a draft-pack afterthought, and an untap glyph hidden inside an activation cost is rare enough that the engine never advertises itself. The body and printed ability are cover for a combo that only assembles when the right partner sits across the table, its payoff structural rather than statistical.