Heliod, Sun-Crowned

Second-generation God design took the devotion clause the first cycle introduced and pointed it forward, turning a gate into a payoff engine. What defines Heliod is the shape of its lifegain trigger: it fires once per instance of lifegain, not once per point. A single Soul Warden ping is worth one counter, but so is a lifelink swing for six, so the reward runs on frequency rather than magnitude. That distinction is what makes it a combo piece instead of a value creature. Tie it to a persistent source of small, repeated lifegain and each trigger is another counter; the classic engine grants a creature lifelink and lets it deal repeated damage, so the life and the counters feed one another in an unbounded loop. The activated lifelink ability is the second half of that puzzle, letting the whole thing run off a single God rather than a fragile stack of enablers. Indestructibility keeps it on the battlefield through most targeted removal, and the devotion-below-five clause means it survives sweepers as a noncreature enchantment when the board is thin, then swings back in as a body once your commitment to white recovers. It reads like a lifegain lord, but the once-per-instance trigger is what put it under the microscope: a card built to reward incidental life becomes a card that ends games the moment lifegain stops being incidental and starts being constant.