Harsh Sustenance

A go-wide payoff dressed as removal, and the symmetry between its two clauses is what makes it read better than it plays. The damage and the lifegain both scale off your board, so the card is at its weakest exactly when you most want a burst of reach: cast it after your creatures have died and X is zero, and you have spent a card for nothing in a token deck that was already overcommitted. To get a meaningful X you need a full board, but a full board is usually a board that wins through combat anyway. That tension (the same bodies that fuel it are the bodies that already close games) is the structural flaw in the whole genre of "burn for the size of your army." The single-target damage clause is the lure; it can finish off a planeswalker or a blocker, but it is too conditional to lean on. The lifegain is the honest reason the card exists. In a creature-flood deck racing an aggressive opponent, swinging a dozen life across the table at instant speed can flip a lost race, and that life total swing is a separate job from the damage entirely. The catch is who collects it: the deck that can generate a wide enough board to make X matter is the deck least likely to have fallen behind in the first place.