Invigorating Falls

Lifegain that scales off the dead, with a number that ticks up faster the longer everyone has been killing each other. The value it reads is whatever has died across the table, which makes this a card whose ceiling is set by the game's tempo rather than your own deck: a long, grindy board war fills both graveyards with creature cards, and this converts all of that attrition into a single sorcery-speed cushion. The problem is that the cushion arrives only as life, with no body attached and no card drawn, so the effect lives or dies on whether raw life total is the resource you are actually short on. Against an aggressive opponent it can spike a total back out of burn range, but it asks you to spend a whole turn doing nothing else, and it asks the graveyards to have done the work first. That dependence is the tension at its center: the card pays out most when the game has gone longest, which is also when a flat life buffer matters least against decks that win by attrition or combo rather than damage. It comes from a line of effects that reward you for the contents of graveyards rather than the contents of your hand, one of the plainer early attempts to make the dead pay rent.