Syphon Life

Two-point drain is one of black's oldest small effects, the kind of swing a single Drain Life pip used to buy. What separates this one is that the spell never really leaves: retrace turns the graveyard into a second hand, letting the same three mana fire again and again so long as you have lands in hand to feed it. That reframes the card entirely. As a one-shot, two life is a rounding error. As a repeatable engine, it converts the surplus lands you draw in the late game into a slow but inexorable drain clock, the floods that stall other decks becoming your win condition instead. The discard cost is the limiter: each recast pitches a land card from hand, so the card asks you to keep drawing enough lands to feed what it eats. That tension (land flood as fuel, an empty hand as the wall) is the whole reason retrace exists, and the underlying effect here is so small that the recursion has to carry it. It also sidesteps damage prevention and life-loss-from-damage hate entirely, since losing 2 life is not damage; nothing about it can be redirected, fogged, or absorbed. A patient card for a patient deck, built to win the long game by refusing to run out of gas.