Ajani's Welcome

The lifegain payoff in its most stripped-down form: one white mana, no body, no upkeep, just a passive that fires every time a creature you control enters. Soul Warden and Soul's Attendant did comparable arithmetic on a 1/1 frame, drawing aggression and dying to anything. Moving the trigger onto an enchantment is a real structural change, not a cosmetic one. The life no longer arrives attached to a target removal can answer, which matters in a deck that wants the engine running uninterrupted across a long game. It also narrows the trigger to your own creatures rather than any creature entering, so it scales with how many bodies you can deploy rather than feeding off an opponent's board you cannot control. The catch is in exactly that narrowing: against an empty board of your own it does nothing, and against a deck that goes wide faster than you do it is a slow bleed against a fast clock. The reward is the compounding curve that makes token strategies and creature-flood decks tick, where each one-life trigger is trivial alone and the aggregate is what buries an opponent who tried to race. It is glue rather than an engine: it demands only more creatures, which the decks that want it were already committed to deploying anyway.