Simian Spirit Guide

Strip the body away and what remains is a ritual that costs no mana, only a card. The exile ability turns a 2/2 Ape Spirit you have no intention of casting into a fixed source of red: no untapped land, no colored payment, just a card spent from hand. In the high-power combo shells where this lives, that is the entire pitch. Decks measuring acceleration in fractions of a turn do not want a creature; they want the free red mana, and the printed body is incidental, a number that never enters the calculation. The lineage runs through Lotus Petal, Lion's Eye Diamond, and the pitch-for-mana logic that lets a deck front-load its explosiveness by treating cards as fuel rather than spells. The crucial wrinkle is that it exiles rather than discards: the card never reaches the graveyard, so it dodges reanimation, threshold counts, and anything that wants to recur or interact with spent cards. That distinction matters more than the stat line ever will, because the spirit's only job is to convert itself into a single point of red on the turn that point of red is worth more than the card itself. Every format that eventually scrutinizes its fast-mana enablers ends up with this one on the list.