Purge the Profane

Four mana to strip two cards from an opponent's hand has always been a tough sell, and the two life tacked on the end is the design admitting it. Discard's whole problem is tempo: every card you spend to empty a hand is a card you are not spending to affect the board, and the opponent draws back into business the next turn. One-sided hand attack at this rate competes with spells that simply kill something, and most of the time killing something wins. What the lifegain buys is a slightly different job. Against an aggressive opponent, taking two cards and gaining two life is a real swing in a race; against a grindy attrition mirror it is a slow way to pry apart a planned sequence. The clause that holds the whole thing back is sorcery speed: you cannot hold up the discard as a reactive answer to a topdeck, so you are always emptying a hand on your own turn, on your own clock, with no way to punish a card the moment it is drawn. That makes it a maindeck attrition piece rather than an interactive one. It does the work a black-white grind deck wants done, but it asks you to value resource denial over board impact, and that trade rarely tips in discard's favor.