Simulacrum

The two-mana instant reads like a designer trying to invent a defensive payoff before the vocabulary existed for one. It couples two effects almost nothing else in the file does: it back-pays your life total for everything that already hit you this turn, then dumps that same amount of damage onto one of your own creatures. The second clause is the strange one. In the early design language for transferring damage was thin, and the solution here is to use your own creature as a sink, presumably to feed something that wants to be dealt damage or to finish off a creature whose power scaled with injury (a trigger that did not actually exist yet). The two halves point at archetypes the game had not built. The lifegain clause wants an aggressive opponent and rewards you for letting damage through; the redirection clause wants a creature that profits from being shot, a space black would not flesh out for decades. Cast at instant speed after combat, it functions as a reactive lifegain spell with a mandatory, awkward rider. What survives is a fossil rather than a finished design: a first pass at the "punish the beatdown" axis that black would eventually develop through life-payment engines and damage-as-resource cards, drawn here with none of the supporting infrastructure to make either clause land.