Cruel Feeding

At a single black, the floor here is deliberately unimpressive: one point of power and lifelink on one attacker, a trick you would rarely bother casting on its own. That thinness is the point, because the scaling cost (a heavy two-and-a-black for every creature past the first) is designed to punish anyone treating this as a cheap combat trick and reward the player who hoards mana to blanket an entire board. The intended arc is a wide swarm plus a late-game glut of untapped lands: give the whole team +1/+0 and lifelink at instant speed, and a single attack step swings the race twice over, gaining life off every connection while pushing extra damage through. Lifelink is what tilts the spell away from pure aggression and toward stabilization; in a deck built to go wide, one combat can move a life total by a dozen or more, turning a defensive posture into a lethal one without changing which creatures are swinging. The escalation is the balancing act: the more targets you want, the more the spell taxes the mana you spent building the board in the first place, so it only pays off in decks constructed to flood the battlefield and sit on resources they have nothing else to burn.