Touch of Darkness

A color-changing trick designed for a very specific era of problem-solving. The instant-speed clause is the whole point: protection from black, color-hosing globals, and conditional removal that names a color all read a creature's color at resolution, so flipping one or more attackers or blockers to black mid-combat (or in response to a spell) rewrites the math in a way Legends-era boards were full of. The plural targeting is unusual for a one-mana instant of this vintage: this is not a single-creature edit but a sweeper-grade color shift, which is what lets it serve as a way to dodge a color-hosing global, a way to make your whole team feed a black-pumping effect at once, or a way to turn a single blocker black so a creature with protection from black can no longer touch it. The design lives in the same conceptual neighborhood as the other color-changers of the period, but the black version is the cheap, combat-oriented one. Its descendants are the broader change-color and changeling effects that later sets used to staple color-matters interactions onto creatures permanently. As a snapshot of mid-nineties design philosophy it is a clean artifact: a card built to weaponize the rules text printed on other cards, and a reminder that color was once a property aggressive enough to be worth attacking directly.