Rith's Attendant

Five colorless mana for a 3/3 that, when you need it, pays one mana and sacrifices itself to hand back a red, a green, and a white: this is fixing wearing a creature costume. Among the Attendants tied to the era's allied three-color shards, this one carries Rith, the Awakener's red-green-white. The design conceit is a creature that holds your colors in escrow until a casting requirement comes due, then trades its body and a single mana to release them. The 3/3 is incidental; the card is a placeholder, a way to keep a fragile colored-mana base afloat back when casting a three-color spell on curve was a genuine deckbuilding problem. The activated ability matters here, not a death trigger: you choose the moment, paying to convert a colorless investment into three colored sources exactly when the shard spell in your hand asks for them. What dates it is precisely what made it useful then. Ramp and fixing have since collapsed into cheaper, more flexible packages that do not ask you to spend a turn parking five mana into a do-nothing artifact first. Rith's Attendant is a snapshot of how color-fixing was solved before mana rocks and fetch-fixing made the job trivial, an artifact creature built to bridge colors when bridging colors was the whole challenge.