Mortality Spear

The premium price for unconditional Golgari removal is the willingness to build a life-gain engine around it. Destroying any nonland permanent at instant speed is a rate that fair decks pay four mana for gladly; the discount clause offers to cut that to two if you have cleared the simplest possible hurdle first. What makes the structure worth examining is how low that bar sits: a single point of lifegain earlier in the turn, from any source (a lifelink swing, an incidental drain, a soul-warden trigger), collapses the cost. The card asks nothing about how much life you gained or when, only that you did, which turns it into a payoff that rewards the same trickle of lifegain synergies that usually accumulate too slowly to matter. That is the problem it answers: lifegain has always struggled to convert incidental gains into board-affecting tempo, and here each trigger becomes a two-mana toll cut on a spell that answers anything. Left uncontrolled, it is a serviceable removal spell at a fair rate. Fed by even a drop of lifegain, it becomes a cheap, flexible answer that leaves mana open for whatever else the turn demands, which is exactly the reward structure that makes lifegain decks feel like they are doing two things with one card instead of paying a tax to stay alive.