Ashenmoor Cohort

Six mana for a 4/3 that becomes a 5/4 the moment you control any other black creature: in a mono-black board, that is most of the time, which makes the conditional a polite fiction and the real body something close to a vanilla 5/4. The bonus is a static ability generating a continuous effect, not a trigger; the size simply exists whenever the board cooperates, with nothing to sequence around and no window to exploit. The era that produced this design leaned hard on color-matters payoffs to reward committing to a single color, and this sits at the gentlest end of that idea: no evasion, no enters-the-battlefield value, no recurring engine, just a stat bump tied to playing the color you were already playing. The rate is the problem. A six-mana creature topping out at 5/4 with no protection and no reach was undertuned for constructed play even in its own time, and the surrounding design space (lords, anthem effects, durable bodies) had already produced better black creatures for less. What it was built for is honest and small: filling out a black aggro curve with a slightly oversized body that does steady work in a board-stall and asks nothing of the deck beyond its color commitment. There is no combo line hiding in the text, no wrinkle to abuse. It gets bigger when you do the obvious thing, and that is the whole of its ambition.