Alchemist's Assistant

Renew is the mechanic worth watching here, because it turns a dead creature in the graveyard into a delivery system for the keyword it was born with. Lifelink on a 2/1 body is nothing new; what the ability does is decouple lifelink from this specific monkey and let you graft it onto whatever creature you actually want draining life later in the game. The exile clause is the price: renewing spends the card permanently, so you get exactly one payout from the yard and no loops, which is why the effect can be as clean as a single mana over the black cost without warping anything. The sorcery-speed restriction closes the door on combat-trick blowouts; you cannot flash lifelink onto a blocker mid-combat, so the counter has to be planned around your own attacks rather than reacted with. What makes this a genuinely two-stage card is that both stages are useful and neither depends on the other: cast it as a cheap lifelinker, and when it dies, its corpse still owes you a permanent buff on something bigger. That is the design idea a lot of graveyard-value cards fumble, either by making the front half a blank or the back half a loop that needs to be checked. This one keeps both halves modest and both halves live.