Nightwing Shade

The Shade pattern at a worse exchange rate. The oldest version of this template buys a point in the air for a single black mana, turning every spare land into a point of evasive damage; here the activation runs , so growth costs two mana per point and surplus lands convert at half the old rate. That tax is the whole story. The printed 2/2 body is almost incidental: the value is the open-ended sink, a place for a flooded black deck to dump excess mana into an evasive clock. Five mana to deploy and no haste means it has to survive a turn before it threatens anything, so the real payoff arrives the turn after, when leftover mana feeds the flying body upward with no toughness ceiling to cap it. The check on the engine is that the pump lasts only until end of turn: the threat deflates every turn and has to be rebought, and a single piece of spot removal cashes out everything you poured in that turn before it connects. No protection, no haste, no efficiency in the activation, just a recurring outlet for mana that would otherwise sit unused. It is the most basic shape black has for converting flood into reach, priced so that the conversion never feels free.