Undercity Shade

A delivery system for a single activated ability, sitting in a line of mana-hungry pump creatures that runs back to Frozen Shade: a small body that converts surplus black mana into combat damage one point at a time, scaling with how many untapped Swamps you can spare. This template carries a higher entry price than the original and pays for none of it on the front end; the 1/1 exists only to hold the ability, which it can fire as many times as your mana allows. Fear handles the evasion (artifact creatures and other black creatures can still block, but against most boards the creature gets through), so each attack reduces to arithmetic: how many points of life separate the defender from dead, measured against your remaining mana. What makes this version dangerous is when it spends that mana. The pump resolves at instant speed, so the creature can pass the declare-blockers step as a harmless 1/1 and then balloon to lethal once the defending player has committed (or once the absence of a legal blocker is confirmed). Its ceiling is your mana base; its floor is a 1/1 that trades down to almost anything. Fear closes the loop by stripping the defender of the simplest answer, throwing a body in front of it, and leaving the question of whether it dies to a topdecked removal spell at the right moment.