Vicious Betrayal

A board converted into a single attacker's lethal arithmetic: every creature fed into the additional cost pushes the target two points in each direction, so an emptied battlefield can turn one survivor into a finisher. The catch lives entirely in the sequencing. The fodder is paid up front as part of casting, before the spell ever resolves, which means the bodies are gone whether or not the spell connects. Because it still has to target, an opponent who answers the chosen creature in response watches the spell fizzle while your sacrifices stay sacrificed: down a board, up nothing, and the bonus never lands. A counterspell does the same damage. The sorcery speed compounds it, locking the play to your own main phase with no combat-step ambush to disguise the commitment. That is the whole proposition, and it belongs to the family of sacrifice-for-power effects that ask you to overcommit before you know the payoff is safe: the inverse of the cheap, hedged combat trick that risks one card to find out. It rewards a deck already flooded with expendable creatures, where the bodies were never the win condition and the only question was how to cash them in. At five mana for an effect that does nothing without a wide board, it is built for one moment: the alpha strike the rest of the game spent setting up.