Angel's Mercy
Pure lifegain at four mana, with no body, no card draw, no rider to soften the tempo loss. This is the kind of design that exists to show beginners what a clean, single-purpose instant looks like, and to give the constructed player a baseline against which every better lifegain spell is measured. Seven life for four is a deliberately unexciting rate: a card spent gaining life is a card not spent affecting the board, and instant speed buys nothing here except the ability to do nothing during an attack. Compare the work other white lifegain has done by attaching the gain to something useful (Rest for the Weary tied it to landfall, Revitalize stapled a cantrip onto a smaller heal, Healing Salve folded prevention and damage into one cheap slot), and the absence of any second function becomes the whole identity. The card is what lifegain looks like before designers learned that lifegain alone almost never justifies a card slot. It races nothing, blocks nothing, and answers nothing; it simply moves a number, which is exactly the lesson it was printed to teach.



