Songs of the Damned

Dark Ritual hands you three black mana for one and asks nothing in return; this asks for everything first. The payout scales one-to-one with dead creatures, which inverts the usual ritual logic: it produces zero off an empty graveyard and a grotesque flood off a full one, making it less a ramp spell than the cash-out clause on a deck already engineered to bury its own bodies. The instant-speed wording is what saves it from being a clunky sorcery-speed mana battery. The burst can be held until an opponent's end step, deployed mid-combat, or sprung in response to an answer, so the count converts to mana on your timing rather than at the front of your turn. The structural friction is built in and self-correcting: the creatures fueling it are the same ones you would rather have alive, so the spell wants self-mill, sacrifice loops, and reanimator shells that treat the graveyard as a resource pool rather than a loss column. Read in isolation it looks like a curiosity from a black ritual cycle that time forgot; read as a scaling burst bolted to a graveyard engine, it tracks the body count exactly, turning every creature you have sent to die into another point of explosive potential.