Borrowed Grace

Escalate is the mechanic that lets a single instant scale with the mana you have left, and few cards use it as cleanly as this team-pump trick. The base mode is a familiar combat math swing: a board-wide +2/+0 or +0/+2 for one white instant's worth of value, the kind of overrun-lite that turns a stalled board into lethal or saves a creature from a single point of damage. The wrinkle is the second mode. Pay the escalate cost and you take both, stacking +2/+2 across your whole team at instant speed, which converts an attack step into a blowout and a block step into a wall that eats whatever runs into it. The design discipline is that the escalate tax is paid per extra mode, so the card always offers a cheap floor and a more expensive ceiling within the same cast: you commit only the mana the board actually needs, and the bluff potential cuts both ways since an opponent cannot know which version is coming until you tap out. That sliding scale is what separates it from a flat two-mode trick like the older split pumps; here the two halves are not a choice between effects but a question of how much you are willing to spend to combine them.