A historic spell is a card thats either an Artifact, a legendary, or a Saga, so youll be getting a lot of extra cards from Jhoira
Many players will look at this card and say sweet, I get rewarded for playing favors and donating permanents to allied players at the table! Many more will look at it and say sweet, I get to instant-kill somebody with Transcendence. Nowadays there are other legends who can let you play Santa Claus, but the original is still top of my lists, for both Naughty and Nice
It also had the advantage of being more elegant than its mirror card Undermine, as it was a simple combination of Healing Salve and Counterspell for the combined price of both of them, and while the strength of the colors meant the ranking here goes the other way, Absorb shows how it's more important to get what you need rather than what is technically more valuable
Their extreme rarity (pull rates of ~1 per 72 packs) combined with the fragility of old foil cards means pristine copies are incredibly scarce