Desperate Lunge

The third clause is the tell about who this was built for. A pump spell that saves your creature in combat is a straight trade: your two mana against their attacker or blocker, one card for one card. Nothing about the +2/+2 generates card advantage on its own. What the lifegain rider signals is that this was never meant to be a pure combat trick optimizing for math. Stapling two incidental life onto a pump-and-evasion spell aims the card at slower white decks that want life triggers as much as they want a surprise on the stack: builds where "gain 2 life" is a payload, not a footnote. The flying grant does the heavy lifting. At two mana at instant speed, it turns a mid-sized ground creature into a reach-check the opponent has to answer or eat, and unlike a static anthem it commits nothing until the exact window it matters (declare-blockers, or an ambush attack step). None of the three effects is large in isolation, which is the honest ceiling here; the appeal is the bundle arriving at the one moment a two-mana instant can swing a race or bail out a blocker. It is a functional piece of white's combat toolbox, priced for a curve rather than a highlight reel, and the lifegain is the quiet clue that its home is the grind, not the tempo mirror.