Soul Summons

The cheapest possible expression of manifest, and the one that strips the mechanic down to its bones: two mana, no creature attached, just the top card of your library turned into a face-down 2/2 with the option to flip it for its mana cost later. There is no body printed on Soul Summons, which is exactly the point. What it sells is the gap between what the 2/2 looks like and what it might become: an opponent has to respect the possibility that the face-down card flips into something far larger or far more disruptive, and every removal spell aimed at it is a bet against your library's top card. The friction is real, though. Half the time the manifested card is a noncreature you can never turn face up, leaving you with a vanilla 2/2 and a card locked under it until that creature dies. That asymmetry, a genuine creature on top versus dead weight on top, is the whole tension the card runs on, and it rewards a deck built to skew the odds. As a piece of the manifest line it sits at the floor: later designs bundled the same effect onto a body or attached riders, but this is the unadorned version, the conversion of one card and a small mana investment into a body now and a flexible threat later.