Monstrous Growth

A pump spell built to the Portal teaching standard: one effect, sorcery speed, no triggers or conditions to track. The set was Wizards' attempt to introduce the game to a beginner audience, so its combat tricks deliberately stripped out the instant-speed surprise that makes pump spells dangerous in the first place. Giant Growth, the card this is plainly modeled on, costs one green and grants +3/+3 at instant speed; this trades a mana for a bigger swing and gives up the entire reason you would hold the card up. Restricted to sorcery speed, it cannot intervene once blockers are declared; it commits before combat, telegraphing the math to the opponent. That is the lesson Portal was teaching, that creatures fight at known sizes on the turn you cast your spells, and it is also why the card never escaped the entry-level context it was printed for. The rate is generous on paper and inert in practice, because a +4/+4 you have to announce ahead of time is a worse threat than a +3/+3 you can spring after blocks. A clean artifact of a moment when the design team was reverse-engineering its own combat math into something a first-time player could parse.