Soul Spike

The mana cost is a fiction the card never expects you to pay. Seven mana for four damage and four life is laughable on its own terms, and the spell knows it: the pitch line is the whole point. Exile two black cards from hand and you have a free Bolt-and-a-half that also swings a race by eight life, and that math is what fringe combo and aggressive black shells have always chased here. The lineage is the pitch-spell family that asks you to spend cards instead of mana, the line that runs back to Force of Will and Pyrokinesis: the spell costs nothing on the stack, so the question is never "can I afford it" but "are the two cards I'm exiling worth less to me than four damage right now." The color tax on the fuel is what narrows it. You need two black cards specifically, which pins it to mono-black or near-mono shells and means every copy in your hand is dead weight unless you have a surplus to burn. That tension (a free burn spell that quietly devours two cards) drives the whole design: it rewards decks built to flood on black and punishes anyone trying to splash it as a one-of. The four life attached looks like filler but does real work, padding the pilot's own clock so a deck racing low can throw the spell without dying to the crackback it would otherwise invite.