Trade Bait This is about honesty
It costs an extra wingding to equip, sure, but the buff it provides to its user keeps increasing, and creating creature/lands means it has the chance at opening up a bunch of synergies that Sword of the Animist does not provide
Every year theres more and more Pokemon TCG sets being released, and even myself, someone who has collected Pokemon cards since 1999, i struggle to keep on top of Pokemon TCG set symbols
As these examples show, the complexity of paying an alternative cost can range from very simple (pretty much like casting the creature normally from your hand, like when evoking, warping, or overloading), to requiring a bit of work (like flashback requiring the spell to be in your graveyard), to demanding very precise timing (such as madness)
Or just a controlling deck that isn't relying on hard removal but instead can use their own characters to remove stuff
You can obtain the Greninja (1-Star Shiny rarity) card by opening Extradimensional Crisis from Extradimensional Crisis set