Crowd's Favor

The convoke tag is the whole pitch here: a pump spell whose mana cost can be paid entirely by the board you already control. The catch is whose creatures pay for it. Attacking creatures are already tapped, so they cannot pitch in for convoke mid-combat unless they have vigilance; the cost gets discounted by the untapped bodies sitting back, the ones that stayed home or were summoned too late to attack. That inverts the usual go-wide tension, where the deck flooding the board has the fewest spare resources to protect its position: the more creatures you have idle, the cheaper this resolves, often to nothing. The payload itself is modest, a single point of power and first strike on one attacker, and the strategic value of first strike when you are ahead on the ground is that it buys a buffer against the chump-block-and-trade that slows a wide assault: your boosted creature lands its damage before the blocker can swing back. As a combat trick it rarely decides a game alone. The design interest sits in the cost structure rather than the effect: convoke on an instant rewards a tempo deck that has spread out, letting the leftover bodies fund a free swing-through. It is small, honest red support for going wide, built so the deck that wants it most is positioned to cast it for free.