Carrion

An instant-speed expression of a question early black kept asking: what does a creature's death yield besides its absence? The conversion here is purely lateral. You feed in one creature's power and receive that many 0/1 bodies in exchange, trading vertical stats for horizontal count. A single 4/4 becomes four chump blockers; a token swarm collapsed back into one big attacker can be re-expanded into a fresh wall. The 0/1 statline is the leash on the rate: the Insects exist to block, to feed sacrifice fodder back into another engine, or to widen a board for some other multiplier, never to win combat on their own. What makes the timing matter is that this casts at instant speed, so the sacrifice doubles as a removal dodge: a creature about to be exiled or bounced can be cashed for its full power on the stack before the answer resolves. It is a recursion-adjacent effect that does not touch the graveyard at all, a strictly battlefield-to-battlefield transmutation. The Insect tokens themselves were part of a broader push to seed black with expendable swarm fodder, a design idea that would resurface in countless aristocrat shells where the bodies are means, not ends. Read as an old card, it is less a finisher than a converter: a one-time valve for turning quality into quantity at the exact moment quantity is what the board state demands.