Breach

Pump-and-evasion stapled together in a single instant is an old idea, executed here at the workmanlike end: a power bump married to fear, sized so the recipient slips past anything that isn't an artifact or another black creature. The design logic is straightforward damage math. Fear was black's answer to the same combat problem flying solves in blue: how to make ground combat resolve in your favor without removing the blocker, by making the blocker illegal against this creature. The +2/+0 converts that connection into a chunk of life, turning a creature that was going to trade or get chumped into a finisher for the turn. Instant speed makes the evasion live, but only inside a single window: resolve it before the Declare Blockers step and the opponent can no longer assign a legal blocker, so a creature that looked stoppable now lands for two extra. Resolve it after blocks are declared and the fear does nothing, since block legality is checked when the block is declared, not after; what remains is a +2/+0. The spell rewards seeing the combat step a beat ahead of your opponent rather than reacting to it. Black has printed cheaper and louder versions of this trick since, and conditional evasion eventually settled on menace, which reads its condition off blocker count rather than off color and type the way fear and intimidate do. An early, honest entry in black's long project of teaching its creatures to walk through walls shaped wrong to stop them.