Ancestral Tribute

Seven mana to gain two life for every card in your bin is a payoff hunting for a deck that fills the yard on purpose, and the era this comes from was exactly that deckbuilding moment. The whole identity of that block ran on the discard pile as fuel: threshold turned a stocked yard into power, flashback rebought spells from it, and the design wanted you to treat your graveyard as an asset rather than a dead zone. Read against that backdrop, this is the safety valve for the player building toward a fat yard, the spell that converts a deep graveyard into a cushion big enough to outlast a race. Look closely at what the flashback exile clause actually touches: only the spell leaves, not the graveyard it counts, so a deck that keeps refilling can collect both tributes (the second at twelve mana) off a yard that stays full. Outside a dedicated mill-yourself or self-discard shell the number stays small and the rate stays poor, which is the honest read: this was never a generically efficient lifegain spell but a reward keyed to a build the surrounding design was actively encouraging. The card is a monument to a graveyard-matters theme more than a staple of any era after it.