Healing Salve

White's slice of Alpha's "boon" cycle, sharing a slot with Ancestral Recall, Dark Ritual, Giant Growth, and Lightning Bolt: a one-mana modal instant meant to give the color its starting-point trick. The other four became format-defining or outright banned; this one became the cautionary tale about how white's entry was priced. Three life or three damage prevented, at a rate that even in 1993 was barely a stall, has aged into one of the weakest one-mana instants ever printed. The design lesson it carries is structural: life gain without a body, a card, or a trigger attached is the hardest effect in the game to make worth a card slot, because the opponent chooses when to commit damage and you have already committed the mana. Every subsequent attempt to fix this slot (Lightning Helix stapling burn to it, Awe Strike scaling with the attacker) has been an admission that the original rate did not work. Designers still reach for it as a calibration point: when someone wants to know how cheap a pure prevention or gain effect needs to be before it earns inclusion, the answer is "cheaper than Healing Salve, with something else attached."