Eternity Vessel

Most life-gain refuses to scale: a one-time reset is too small to matter against any real clock, and incremental drain rarely keeps pace with the damage coming back. The design answer here is to snapshot your life total at the moment the artifact resolves, freeze it as charge counters, and refund you back to that number whenever a land hits the battlefield under your control. The figure never recalculates, so whatever you bank on the way in is the ceiling you keep snapping back to, no matter how low you fall in between. That timing is the whole trick: the optimal sequence is to inflate your life as high as you can manage, then drop this, then ride landfall to that locked height for the rest of the game. It turns a single bandage into a recurring fortress, one that wants fetchlands, extra land drops, and anything else that floods the table with land triggers. The cost of admission is steep: six mana for a permanent that does nothing the turn it lands and gives back exactly the life you walked in with, never a point more. It does not gain ground; it refuses to surrender it. The deck that wants it is one already invested in manipulating its own life total and dropping lands at will, since the artifact asks nothing of the board and everything of how reliably you can keep the land coming.