Really there are a lot of better choices out there for a single blue mana if all you care about is gaining life / preventing yourself from taking damage
Crackle with Power Unless you have what could best be described as an arbitrary amount of mana, its just hard to get Crackle with Power to play well
Each time you remove one of its four time counters, you get to unleash a 2/2 hasty Dinosaur, ready to be buffed up when the Dinosaurs themselves finally hit the battlefield later
Now compare those joke-only cards or bad cards with those that work within the rules of Magic well enough to have value at the kitchen table, and which are more than just a joke: Consider Giant Fan and Goblin Bookie as two cards that sort of counter the above issues
A case could be made that there was no greater skill tester than Disrupting Scepter, but not because it forced your opponent to make hard decisions
Moving forward, decks like Expertise Fuse Reanimator and Esper Bird Brains in Modern will simply no longer existabusing the converted mana cost of split cards was the entire plan of these decks