Make Your Mark

A combat trick that pays you for losing the fight. The +1/+0 is almost incidental: one extra point of power rarely swings a block outright, and it isn't the reason to cast this. The reason is the death clause. Point this at a creature about to trade, or one you fully expect to die in combat or to a removal spell, and the loss converts into a 3/2 body that outsizes most of what killed it. That inverts the usual arithmetic of a pump spell, where the whole point is to keep your creature alive; here the trick wants your creature dead, and the smaller the creature it's cast on, the better the exchange looks. It also plays cleanly on the defensive: attach it to a chump blocker and the chump becomes a delayed 3/2, so you're never really trading down. The hybrid cost makes it castable off either half of a two-color aggressive shell without asking the manabase for anything. The wrinkle is timing discipline: the Spirit only arrives if the creature dies this turn, so cast it into a block or a removal spell you can see coming, not preemptively hoping something dies later. Cast well, it's a two-for-one stapled to an instant; cast on a creature that survives, it's a wasted point of power.