Fall of Cair Andros

Amass has almost always been a keyword that grows on your own terms: attack triggers, sacrifice payoffs, cast-a-spell counters. This one turns the mechanic inside out by feeding it on your opponent's dying creatures, specifically the waste in their death. Excess noncombat damage is the number a burn spell or removal effect spills past a creature's toughness: bolt a two-toughness blocker for three and one damage is normally lost, but here that lost point becomes an Orc counter. The design reframes overkill, ordinarily the most inefficient thing you can do in a game of damage math, as a resource. A big X burn spell that flattens a small creature suddenly builds an Army in the same motion, and the wider the overkill, the larger the token. The second ability keeps the card from being a pure freeloader: an eight-mana repeatable seven-damage blast that both removes a threat and, when it overshoots a small target, refills its own Army. That makes it a self-sustaining engine rather than a passive trigger, since the sink you pay into is also a source. What balances the whole thing is that it does nothing against creatures you can only trade with in combat, and nothing at all until damage actually exceeds toughness; it rewards a deck already built to point damage everywhere, then converts the arithmetic that would otherwise be discarded into a growing board.