Armistice

Every activation hands the opponent three life, and that gift is the lever the whole card balances on: white gets a permanent, repeatable card-draw outlet, but only by topping off the exact resource white is built to defend. The arithmetic punishes you in any race, since three life a turn keeps the opponent further from zero and pushes the game longer than an aggressive white deck wants it to go. Where it pays off is the deadlocked grind, the control mirror where neither player is close to dead and the donated life is simply irrelevant. There, an enchantment that restocks your hand turn after turn becomes a slow strangulation of the long game. Early-era white had few honest answers to repeatable card advantage: wheels lived in other colors, and most white draw was a sorcery-speed one-shot. This was an early attempt to give white a renewable refill without breaking the color's identity, solved the way white usually solves these problems, by attaching a cost the opponent gets to enjoy. The open timing on the activation does work the flat numbers hide: holding the five mana for a window where you owe nothing, rather than spending it down when you have other things to do, is what separates a dead permanent from a flexible reactive engine. Cast proactively it bleeds races; held back as an instant-speed refill, it grinds them out.