Ajani's Mantra

One life per upkeep, with no body, no upside, and no second clause to it. It exists to round out a casual product's lifegain count rather than to ever earn a deck slot: the trigger is optional, the gain is fixed at one, and nothing scales it or converts it into pressure. Where lifegain has found real homes, it has done so by attaching the gain to a payoff (a creature that grows, a drain that punishes the opponent, a soul-sister trigger that fires on something else's arrival), or by gaining enough to matter against a clock. This does neither. It sits on the battlefield gaining one life a turn forever, a quantity that loses races to almost any threat printed alongside it. The honest read is that it was built as common-rarity flavor and shelf-filler, a small nod to Ajani's healing identity rather than a card asking to be played. In the formats where a lifegain count is itself a synergy axis, the enchantment's permanence is the only thing in its favor; everywhere else, the upkeep tick is too small and too slow to be the engine a deck is built around.