Renounce

The instinct is to read this as a panic button: opponent points a destroy-all-creatures spell at you, and you cash in your board for life before it resolves. That works, and it's the dramatic version. The duller, more honest version is that this is a sacrifice outlet with no throughput, no card draw, no token, no upside beyond the lifegain itself. White rarely gets to sacrifice its own permanents at all, and almost never at instant speed across any number of them at once. That open-ended count is the whole design: there is no cap, no "up to," no targeting friction, just a single instant that empties as much of your side of the table as you choose and pays two life apiece. The strategic axis it creates is purely defensive value extraction. If your permanents are about to die for nothing (to a board wipe, to a sacrifice-them edict you'd rather control, to a steal effect), this converts them into a life total instead of conceding them. It also feeds anything that cares about your own permanents leaving play, since it can dump them by the handful at the moment of your choosing rather than one at a time. The card never built an archetype because the payoff is too thin to anchor one: two life per body is a salvage rate, not an engine, and a salvage spell only matters in the narrow window when salvage beats letting things resolve.