Grave Strength

Ordinary pump spells reward a board that has developed; this one rewards a board that has been spent. The counter total keys off dead creatures, not living ones, so the buff grows in proportion to how much attrition your black deck has already weathered. The sequencing is where the design earns its keep: you mill three first, then count creature cards in the yard, which means those three freshly buried cards can feed the payoff themselves. Even a pristine graveyard can produce one, two, or three counters if the mill cooperates. That folds two black graveyard staples (self-mill and a body-count value swing) into a single two-mana pump, and it scales with exactly the wreckage a graveyard-centric deck is trying to assemble anyway. The mill costs almost nothing in a randomized library: each pitched card is as good as the next draw, so the only price is library depth, paid back as a fatter counter total. Cast at sorcery speed, it forfeits the ambush window an instant would have bought. And the counters it leaves are only as durable as the creature holding them: removal, bounce, or exile takes the body and the buff in one motion. The growth is permanent but unprotected, which is the honest limit on a spell that otherwise scales without a ceiling.