Profane Prayers

The reward scales off a creature type you have to commit your whole board to, which is exactly the problem and exactly the design. With X equal to the number of Clerics in play (yours and your opponent's, counting every battlefield), the spell does nothing in a deck that isn't already saturated with the tribe, and gestures toward something close to a board wipe's worth of reach in one that is. The dual return is the part that earns the name: every point of damage is matched by a point of life gained, so a Cleric deck that has spent the game eking out small drains gets a single sorcery that converts its board presence into both a finisher and a cushion against the race back. This is the same wager the lord effects and tribal anthems make, asking you to commit a critical mass of on-type bodies before the payoff arrives, except here the payoff is removal and a life swing rather than a static buff. The any-target clause keeps it flexible without making it more forgiving: it can go upstairs as a life-swing burn spell or downstairs to clear a threat, but only after the tribe has done the heavy lifting of setting X. Outside a dedicated Cleric shell it is a blank, and that narrowness is the cost the design charges for letting the payoff get as large as the board does.