Exsanguinate

The drain is the cleaner cousin of every life-loss-with-lifegain effect black has reached for since its early years, and the symmetry of its math separates it from incremental attrition. Most drain spells split the swing across a single opponent: you take a chunk, they take a chunk, and the gap is the spell. This one multiplies. Each opponent loses X, but the life you gain is the total of all life lost, so the more players at the table, the further the lifegain outpaces any single drain. In a one-on-one game that is just a slightly inefficient pump-and-burn; in a multiplayer pod, the asymmetry compounds, and X mana that took everyone to two becomes a forty-life cushion for the caster. The design lives entirely in that gain-equals-total clause, which turns a fair-looking X-spell into a swing that scales with the size of the game rather than the size of the X. It pays off black ramp decks that flood the board with mana rocks and rituals, then dump everything into one cast: the spell does not care about creatures, combat, or the stack beyond a single sorcery-speed window, so its only real check is having enough mana to make X lethal across the board at once.