Mountain Titan

Two separate taxes guard a body that does nothing on its own: a flat 2/2 that costs four to deploy, then a three-mana activation that only switches the engine "on" for a single turn. The activation grants no counter by itself; it merely opens a conditional window where each black spell you cast that turn drops a +1/+1 counter on the Giant. Growth is therefore gated twice, behind both the up-front cost and your ability to chain black spells before the window closes. That double charge is what kept it honest in its day: it pays off a deck genuinely flooded with black card volume, not a splash, and it punishes anyone who flips the switch on an empty hand. The flavor tracks the math cleanly, a Giant swelling on dark sorcery, but the lasting interest is structural. This is mid-nineties black-red identity in miniature, where wedding two colors bought you an engine that demanded your whole turn serve it before it returned a thing. Later designs would price their payoffs lower and forgive a missed beat; this one still asks you to spend a full turn assembling one fleeting burst of growth, and offers nothing if the turn falls short.