Holy Strength

The defensive twin to Unholy Strength, and a clean window into how the earliest design encoded color identity. Where black's one-mana aura skewed offense (+2/+1, push damage through), white's mirror skewed survival (+1/+2, soak it). The numerical inversion is the entire design: same converted mana cost, same card type, same enchant clause, but the toughness bump is the larger of the two, which tells you exactly what white's combat math was supposed to do in the original five-color framework. A 1/1 wearing this becomes a 2/3 that trades up into 2/2s and walls off two-power attackers indefinitely, while the same creature under the aggressive +2/+1 line becomes a 3/2 that swings for three but dies to a 2/2 in combat. That single point of stat allocation is the early color pie in miniature: white buys you the block, black buys you the hit. It has been outclassed for decades (Auras that die to removal two-for-one have aged worse than almost any approach to creature enhancement), and the rate has been lapped by buff effects that also draw a card or grant evasion. The lasting interest is purely archival: a baseline reading of what one white mana was worth in the game's earliest math, and a tidy illustration of how the original design wrote color philosophy into the smallest possible mechanical gesture.