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Draw-three-and-gain-life has always been a stabilizing effect priced for the late game: the classic model asks for a heavy sorcery-speed investment and hands you refill plus a buffer against whatever was racing you. What affinity does here is flip that math. The printed cost is a full seven, the kind of number you would expect to pay in a control mirror, but every artifact on the board shaves it down, so a deck already flooding the battlefield with tokens, equipment, or vehicles reaches a point where the card is nearly free. The tension is entirely in the discount curve. Play it for the effect alone and you will often pay near full price, which is a poor rate for a three-card refill and a small life swing. Make the affinity real and you cast that same package for a couple of mana in the same turn you are doing everything else, which is a different card entirely. Affinity has historically lived on artifacts that reduce the cost of aggressive threats or cheap card advantage; attaching it to a white-blue draw-and-gain package is the less obvious application, aimed at the artifact deck that wins slowly and wants fuel rather than reach. The color pair is the tell: this belongs to the board-flooding midrange plan, not the burst finish.