Gateway Shade

The Shade template (pay mana, grow until end of turn) is the oldest scaling-creature pattern black owns: an empty body that converts spare mana into a clock. What this one bolts on is a second growth lever tied to a niche land subtype. Tapping an untapped Gate grants +2/+2 with no mana spent, so in a shell built around those lands the activation stops draining your tempo and runs as a parallel engine beside the pump. Both abilities stack within a turn: dump mana and tap Gates in the same attack step, and three or four Gates can lift a 1/1 into lethal range out of nowhere. The cost of that ceiling is the premise itself. Strip the Gates away and the second line is dead text, leaving a plain Shade whose only outlet is a pump that older, cheaper Shades sell for less. The card lives or dies on whether you treat a land type as a payoff rather than as fixing: high ceiling, floor among the lowest in its class. It belongs to a handful of designs that asked players to count Gates as a resource you actively accumulate, and it is the one that wired that count straight into combat damage instead of into a one-shot effect.