Shade's Breath

The Shade is one of black's oldest archetypes: a creature that converts excess mana into raw size, from Frozen Shade in Alpha down through every Nantuko Shade and Looming Shade since. This instant takes that single-creature ability and stamps it across your whole team for a turn, turning a board of vanilla bodies into a swarm of black mana sinks. The firepower comes rented rather than owned, expiring at end of turn, so the Swamps you pour into it buy one attack step and nothing past it. That expiry date is exactly what makes instant speed matter: you wait until blockers commit or until a removal spell forces your hand, then dump mana into the bodies that survive, sizing up only the creatures that actually connect. The natural home is a mono-black deck that ends its turn with an empty grip and a full pool of untapped land, looking to cash a late-game mana glut into a lethal swing. Nothing about the per-pump rate is generous; the whole appeal is the conversion, taking the one resource black has always carried in surplus and spending it as a finish line. Spread across an entire team at instant speed, that surplus becomes a damage output most single-creature Shades could never reach in one turn.