Comforting Counsel

Lifegain has always struggled to convert its resource into board presence: the life total climbs, the game stalls, and the payoff usually lives on a fragile creature or a one-shot drain. This threads the needle differently. It sits outside the combat math as an enchantment, counting each lifegain event rather than the total gained, so a chain of small triggers pays out the same as one large heal. The bar is a flat five, and everything above zero counters is dead weight until you clear it. That threshold is the whole tension: below five, this does nothing for your board and demands you keep feeding it; at five, every creature you control swings by three in both directions, which turns a durdling lifegain shell into a genuine kill window. The design leans on frequency over magnitude, rewarding decks built around repeated incremental gains (soul-sisters triggers, lifelink chip damage, small drains) rather than single big heals. It also asks a real deckbuilding question, because a static +3/+3 anthem that only comes online after five discrete gain events wants a critical mass of bodies waiting to receive the buff. Get there and the payoff is disproportionate to two mana; stall at four counters and it is an inert permanent begging for one more trigger.