Nourish

Six life for two green mana is the rawest the lifegain rate has ever been allowed to get, and the reason it stays a footnote is that raw lifegain has almost never been the bottleneck in a deck that wants it. Stripped of any rider (no creature attached, no card draw, no land in hand), this is a pure exchange of two mana for a swing in the life total, an effect printed at roughly the same rate for two decades because nobody can find a reason to push it harder or a reason to play it when they could. Healing Salve gave three for one; this doubles the output and doubles the cost, holding the price-per-point constant. The one lever that gives it any teeth is the window: held up against a burn-heavy opponent or a math-tight race, it can blow out a lethal calculation at end of turn. But a deck buying time with life rather than board presence is usually losing the longer game anyway, which is why dedicated lifegain payoffs (the cards that turn life into something) consistently win the slot over the cards that just produce it. Nourish is the clean control sample: lifegain with nothing else asked of it, and proof that the bare number was never the part worth building around.