Frozen Shade

Every black creature whose text box reads "pay mana, get bigger" is iterating on the shape this card drew first. The Shade template is the whole pitch: a body that is almost nothing on its own (a 0/1 chump-blocker), paired with a repeatable activated ability that turns every untapped Swamp into a turn-long stat boost. The trade is honest. You pay up front for the creature, then pay again every turn to make it threatening, and the ceiling scales with your land count rather than your hand. That design did real work in early Magic, where mana sinks were the answer to flooding out, and it established a black-creature archetype the color returns to whenever it needs a finisher that does not ask for spell support: Nantuko Shade and Looming Shade are the same idea with cheaper entry costs and bigger starting bodies. By modern standards the numbers run cold, a 0/1 at three mana sits well below the power band today, and the activation is steep relative to what newer Shades and pump-creatures offer. What persists is the template, not the card. The structural idea (a small permanent whose threat is metered out by your open mana, capped only by your board) was clean enough on its first printing that black has never needed to redesign it from scratch, only to lower the entry cost and let the body start bigger.