Royal Herbalist

Two generic mana and a card from your deck buys a single point of life, and the math has not gotten kinder with age. The activation reads like a penalty clause attached to a creature that does almost nothing on its own. This is what incremental lifegain looked like when designers priced repeatable effects as though small advantages would compound dangerously: wall the engine behind a prohibitive cost, and treat exiling your own cards as a real tax rather than a resource. The irony is in what the game became afterward. Self-exile turned into fuel: impulse draw, graveyard and exile payoffs, cards that want you to banish your library because something cashes in on the pile. Here, the exile pays out nothing. It is pure friction, a cost with no second use, the part of the design that was supposed to keep the ability honest. So the one-mana 1/1 Cleric body is the only reason to run it, and the ability is a coupon nobody redeems. It endures as a clean snapshot of mid-90s caution, when a slow trickle of life was considered powerful enough to gate behind mana, a card, and an exile clause that later sets would have turned into the whole point.