Renewed Faith
The lifegain is almost beside the point. Six life at instant speed is a respectable rate, but the structure is built around the fact that you will rarely cast it for that. Cycling for two mana draws a card and hands you two life on the way out, which means the floor here is never a dead draw: when you need answers, it cantrips; when you need to survive, it stays in hand as a six-point swing against a burn deck or a racing aggressor. That split is what made it a quiet workhorse of white control. Most life-payoff and incidental-lifegain shells want a card that contributes whether it shows up early or late, and this one refuses to be a liability in either spot. The two-life cycling rider is the clever part: it turns a smoothing effect into a marginal life payoff that triggers off the cycle itself, so decks that care about the act of gaining life (rather than the amount) get a trigger for the cost of a card draw they wanted anyway. It is a design that treats flexibility as the resource being sold, with the mode you choose dictated entirely by the board in front of you rather than by a guess you locked in at deckbuilding.

Rules text
Format Status
More formatsFewer formats
Other printings
- Amonkhet Remastered#32
- The List#A25-31
- Masters 25#31
- Amonkhet#25
- Vintage Masters#42
- World Championship Decks 2004#jn50
- World Championship Decks 2003#dz50sb
- World Championship Decks 2003#dz50









