Gruesome Scourger

Black rarely gets to point damage at a face without paying in life or a body. Here the payment is board development: the enters trigger scales with the creatures you already control, a quiet reversal of how the color usually spends its mana. Most reach effects in black are drain spells that ping the opponent and gain you life; this one skips the lifegain entirely and turns a wide board into a direct shot at an opponent or planeswalker, no attack step required. That framing matters, because the damage lands when the trigger resolves rather than through combat: it fires past blockers instead of into them, dodging the whole combat-math conversation. It counts itself, so the floor is a single point on an empty board, but the design clearly wants to be the last card cast in a swarm, functioning as a second alpha strike aimed at a defended planeswalker or a low opponent. The interaction is not free, though. The creature spell can be countered like any other, a Stifle effect can eat the trigger outright, and instant-speed removal answers it in a subtler way: because the count is checked on resolution, a well-timed kill during the trigger's window shrinks the damage before it happens. At 3/3 for five it is priced to be a payoff, not an engine piece; the body barely registers next to the trigger. It sits with the black cards that reward going wide instead of going tall.