If you support Blood Artist/Aristocrat synergies in your cube and Spawning Pit isn't on your radar, then it very much should be. Allow me to try and persuade you of that. The more I play with and against this tool the more it seems to be one of the clear premium sac outlets available alongside Carrion Feeder and Goblin Bombardment, despite never having had a breakout performance in any constructed setting. Spawning Pit is free and convenient to sac, cheap to deploy and good returns all being key factors in why it is good. Colourless is a nice perk allowing you to play it anywhere although in practice I am not often playing this outside of a black deck. As such this marks it a little above Bombardment for playability but not Feeder. On the flip side, it is a non creature card making it more resilient to removal, and is thus more consistently able to perform its role for you. Better than Feeder but not Bombardment on that metric. Note that while it is sharing floors, it is exceeding ceilings in these comparisons. Always a strong start.
Another noteworthy thing to consider when comparing Carrion Feeder and Goblin Bombardment is that they scale in power in an inverse way. Feeder is best early when it can be a growing threat and it is mostly just a sac outlet late. Goblin Bombardment on the other hand, is a phenomenal finisher late and a bit low tempo and low impact early on. Both do at least retain use throughout the game hence why they are such premium cards in a strong archetype. Spawning Pit on the other hand retains a much flatter performance line over the course of a game with a greater area underneath it (better average power level). As with Carrion Feeder, sacrifices translate into stats on the board which is pressure and tempo. This means earlier sacrifices hurt your board position a lot less. Yes, with Bombardment you will typically take out their board and so it might seem like a more equal trade but this type of deck wants to develop a board rather than trade off for one. Stagnant or growing are the states to be in.
Now, stats are great. They win combats and apply damage to face. The more you have the more you are typically winning. I said Spawning Pit and Carrion Feeder are both better earlier sac outlets as they do a better job of conserving stats but this is barely scratching the surface. Pit is so vastly superior to Feeder in this aspect that I remain surprised that the Pit has not broken out into common knowledge sooner. Firstly, the stats afforded you from Pit can block. This is pretty significant. Doubly so for a deck looking to clog up the board. Next, the stats from Pit are in convenient discrete 2/2 chunks. Going wide is generally better than going tall and it absolutely is when you are wanting to trigger things like Blood Artist. You cannot lose all your stats to a single spot removal spell when you are going wide either. They are easier to get damage through with. The only real advantage of going tall on one dork is being able to win combat. Not even close to outweighing the many things on the other side of the scale.
There is also the ability that Pit has to deploy bodies to the board at instant speed. It allows you to recover very quickly in the face of mass removal and generally be annoying when it comes to playing around your opponents sorcery speed actions. It feels a bit like a Currency Converter when it is chucking out 2/2s at the end of turn. The real hidden power of the Spawning Pit is however something I have saved until last. It is not at all impossible that until now you have considered the Feeder and the Pit equivalent in terms of return for a sac; that being a total of +1/+1. The pit however is self fuelling. Every dork it makes it can then sacrifice again and reuse to make another dork. So your sac is worth +1.5/+1.5 each. But hang on, that second dork you make from sacrificing the first, that can also be reused and so we are now looking at +1.75/+1.75 stats yield from a single initial set of sacrifices. You can in theory carry this series on indefinitely but in practice you are only getting more than a couple of generations deep with some of your sacrifices. An assumed average of close to +1.5/+1.5 is probably pretty reasonable. Even so, it is lots of bodies and lots of stats. Lots more than you think. And this is exactly what you want.
Envisage a board where you have two Blood Artist effects and three other creatures. Lay a Pit into that with three or more mana spare and you can deal over 10 damage before you even need to touch either of the Blood Artists, you even find yourself with a counter left on the Pit so assuming they can trigger themselves and you have a mana more the damage can continue on to potentially 14. That will stun opponents when it happens. They will want to recount the damage because it doesn't seem plausible or correct!
I did earlier mention that I wouldn't likely be playing the Pit outside of a Blood Artist style deck however the more I thought on this the more I would be happy playing this card in any creature heavy deck that found itself facing a relatively wide selection of problems to which it could help. I might have a white weenie deck that really struggled to have a good way to play around mass removal. I might proactively play it in a white weenie deck if I had enough cards that buff and are triggered by the making of creature tokens. I may well find myself playing the card as a means to prevent Jitte counters. I might even play it in a deck vulnerable to exile based removal that really wants to ensure your dorks can only die as far as the graveyard, be that for on death triggers or as a place to return them to action from. It didn't take me long at all to think of an impressive chunk of reasons that I might want to play this powerful and versatile card. I hope I have persuaded you that you should give it a whirl yourself.
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