Pile On

Unconditional destruction on an instant has always carried a mana surcharge: black pays a premium to hit anything without restriction, and four mana for that privilege is the going rate. The trick is that convoke lets you refuse to pay it in mana. Tapping a board of creatures to cast a removal spell inverts the usual math of a black deck, which normally wants its bodies attacking and its mana untapped for interaction. Here the bodies are the interaction, which means the spell gets cheapest exactly when you have the widest board, the same texture that already wants a way to trade up into an opposing threat. The surveil 2 rider is the smaller half, but it does real work in a graveyard-fed deck: kill the creature or planeswalker at instant speed, then set up your next two draws or feed the yard with fodder you were going to loop anyway. What makes the combination worth noting is the sequencing it invites. Convoke rewards a full board; surveil rewards a graveyard plan; and the removal is clean enough to justify holding creatures back for a turn to answer whatever the opponent commits to. It is a removal spell that asks the deck around it to already be doing two other things, and pays out most when both are true.