Life shards bump up the healing spell quite nicely. Also, strengthening that spell might not be such a good idea: with a 2+ caster champs in the stack a strong healing spell would mean that if a unit cannot be one-shotted, it is for all practical purposes immortal.
And with life magic, one shotting the unit might not be enough to beat it...
And on that note, has anyone else been noticing that death ward brings the unit back with full health (or is this only when some other effect is active)? And, that if death ward gets re-cast on a unit after it gets used you now have two instances of death ward active on the unit in the enchantments pane?