March of Wretched Sorrow

The whole cycle traded excess cards for a discount, but the mono-color version of this idea lands best in black, where the payoff is a scalable drain: X damage to a creature or planeswalker, X life back, priced by however many black cards you're willing to exile from hand to shave the cost. That trade is where the tension lives. Every card you feed it makes the spell cheaper and the effect bigger relative to your mana, but you're paying in raw cards, and black hands are rarely flush with surplus. Casting it big on turn two means gutting your own hand; casting it small leaves you with a plain life-swing X-spell. The lifegain matters more than it reads. A pure burn X-spell answers a threat; this one answers a threat and stabilizes the race in the same instant-speed window, which is the mode aggressive black decks and life-total-sensitive control shells both want. Set against the classic Consume Spirit or Corrupt line of drain-removal, the hand-exile discount lets it come down early without the heavy mana commitment those older cards demanded, at the cost of the resources most black decks are already hoarding for other uses.