Horrible Hordes

Rampage was Mirage's attempt to make blocking a math problem, and this colorless 2/2 is among its purest expressions: a body that taxes the gang-block. The mechanic reads as defensive flavor (the swarm grows angrier the more you pile onto it) but functions as a blocking deterrent, punishing the opponent for committing extra bodies to the chump. Against a single blocker it behaves like a vanilla 2/2; throw a second and third blocker in front of it and it swells, picking up enough power to deal lethal damage spread across the wall rather than dying for nothing. The arithmetic only ever favors the attacker when the defender overcommits, which is the design's whole point. The "beyond the first" clause is the discipline doing the balancing work: one blocker leaves the creature at its printed size, so it never grows when unblocked, only when the defender stacks bodies. That made Rampage a self-correcting keyword, rewarding restraint on defense rather than raw stats. The artifact type is the other quiet feature, letting a Spirit slot into any color's roster as colorless aggression, though the body is small enough that the Rampage trigger is the whole point. History was not kind to the mechanic: Rampage proved swingy and hard to evaluate at a glance, demanding per-creature counting that bogged down combat, and Wizards retired it after a handful of sets in favor of cleaner blocking-tax design like trample and menace, which raise the cost of multi-block decisions without the fiddly arithmetic Rampage demanded.