Devouring Rage
A five-mana instant handing one creature +3/+0 is a terrible trade in a vacuum, and the card was never priced for that mode. The additional cost (sacrifice any number of Spirits) is where the math turns: a wide, parked battlefield becomes a stacked pump that grows by +3/+0 for every body you cash in. Slotted into the Arcane subtype, it feeds the splice-and-channel ecosystem the Spirit tribe was built around, chaining off other Arcane cards and rewarding a deck already flooding the table with tokens and small fliers. The design tension is in the timing. Casting at instant speed lands the payoff after blockers are declared, when the opponent has committed to combat math that no longer holds; you are not pumping to win a race, you are spending a fistful of expendable Spirits to ram a single unblocked threat past whatever life total remains, and the permanents you just liquidated stop mattering because the game is over. The sacrifice clause ties lethality to attrition: each additional three points of damage costs you a permanent, so this functions only as a finisher, never as incremental value. It demands you have already built the board it consumes, which makes it a haymaker rather than a tempo play.
