Leonin Sanctifier

Perpetually is the word that turns a fragile two-drop lifelinker into something worth sequencing around. Most lifelink grants are conditional: auras that die with their host, combat-window pumps that lapse at end of turn, keywords that evaporate when the granting permanent leaves. Here the modification attaches to a specific creature card while it still sits in your hand, before it is ever cast, and travels with that card through every zone it touches: recast after bounce, returned from the graveyard, blinked, whatever happens next. That front-loading is the design idea. The buff scales with whatever you were already going to play, so dumping it onto your biggest threat converts every point of that creature's future damage into lifegain regardless of what becomes of the Sanctifier itself. The cost is deliberately narrow. You need a creature card in hand the moment it enters, the choice is locked to one card and cannot be redirected, and the granting body is a 2/1 that dies to almost anything. The lesson the mechanic teaches is order of operations: play the Sanctifier ahead of the payoff, not after, and commit to a single decision made once. Treating lifelink as a durable, hand-targeted modification rather than a battlefield aura is why this card is built the way it is.