Ghoul's Feast

The pump spell whose payoff lives in the wrong zone: instead of scaling off creatures you control, it counts the ones already dead. Most combat tricks reward you for committing to the board; this one rewards you for having lost it, turning a graveyard full of casualties into a single oversized swing. The number it produces can be enormous when the yard is stocked with bodies, but the constraint is structural rather than numeric: it grants only power, nothing to toughness, so the buffed creature still dies to anything that would have killed it before. You are pointing a fragile creature at a damage race and asking it to win in one swing or not at all. The instant timing is the saving grace, letting you wait for a profitable block or an unblocked attacker rather than telegraphing the boost a turn early, but a self-mill or aristocrats shell still has to assemble two things at once: a board to swing with and a graveyard worth counting. That double requirement is why the effect reads bigger than it plays. It belongs to a recurring black design impulse, the spell that pays you back for your own attrition, the same instinct that later produced graveyard-as-resource cards across the color; here the resource is bodies, and the conversion rate is one dead creature to one point of damage.