Lifelace

The green entry in Alpha's "lace" cycle, where each color got a cheap instant that recolored a spell or permanent into its own color. The design intent was a sideboard-style hoser: shift a target's color to slip it past, or into, a color-specific answer. Recolor a red permanent green to dodge Blue Elemental Blast, or paint a spell on the stack to make it vulnerable to a counter or destroy effect keyed to a particular color. In practice, the lace cycle is a museum piece. It assumes a metagame saturated with color-hosers (Circles of Protection, the Elemental Blasts, color-specific kill spells) deep enough that recoloring a single target justifies spending the turn on it, and Magic moved away from that texture almost immediately. The parenthetical clarification about mana symbols remaining unchanged shows old-frame design working through a rules system still being figured out in public: color identity and mana cost were not yet cleanly separated concepts, and the card had to specify which one it was touching. What survives is the template. Every color-changing effect printed since descends from the lace cycle's basic question: what does it mean for color to be a property you can target and change? This is the green answer to that question, frozen at the moment Magic first asked it.