Crowd of Cinders

A self-counting beater that takes a census of your board rather than its intensity. The body grows by the number of black permanents you control, and the word "permanents" carries the whole distinction: a black enchantment counts once, a black token counts once, and a creature whose cost is three black pips still adds exactly one. Note what does not feed it: ordinary Swamps are colorless because they have no mana cost, so a basic mana base sits outside the count entirely. This is not a devotion payoff and predates that keyword's structural cousins; devotion reads mana symbols in your committed permanents, while this reads colored bodies on the battlefield. A deck splashing black gives it almost nothing; a deck built to the floor in mono-black turns every creature, token, and black artifact into another point of power and toughness. Fear is the half of the design that converts that bulk into a clock: the same saturated board that inflates the creature is exactly the board most opponents cannot stop, since blocking it demands their own black or artifact creatures, which a non-black deck rarely fields. The lineage runs through black beaters whose size lives off board state rather than a printed number, and the trade those cards all accept shows up here too: stats with no floor. One sweeper does not merely kill a creature; it deletes every permanent the body was standing on. The card is at its most lethal and its most brittle in the same instant.