Swarm of Rats

A tribal payoff that points the count at itself: rather than handing a static bonus to the rest of the tribe, this body grows by the number of Rats you control, including the other copies of itself you might field. That self-referential design is the whole point. Run one in isolation and it is a marginal */1; assemble a colony and this creature, specifically, swells to match the count. The distinction matters, because the math lives on the creature itself rather than on a separate anthem or a designated lord. You point at your Rats, you count, you have its power: the board state explains its own size. The Portal line was meant to teach Magic to new players with clean, splashy text, and this is a tidy lesson in tribal arithmetic dressed up as a variable-power creature, no parsing of "other" or "each" required because the card only ever cares about its own bottom number. The toughness pinned at 1 is what keeps the whole thing honest: a Rat that grew arbitrarily wide in power while also surviving sweepers and ping effects would be a very different, far less teachable card. It remains a bedrock reference point for black Rat tribal, the cheap scaling threat the rest of the swarm exists to feed.