Honden of Cleansing Fire
Two life a turn is a rounding error; what makes the white anchor matter is that the count reads every Shrine you control, so the trigger climbs by another two for each member of the cabinet you add. Of the five, this is the one whose payoff is hardest to outrace once the board fills out: a single Shrine gains a token amount, but a full set turns the upkeep into a lifegain wall, and the scaling is the entire design idea. Each Shrine references the others, which makes any one of them filler in isolation and the whole assembly worth far more than its parts. That dependency is also the design's honesty: a lone Shrine asks almost nothing of an opponent, and the lifegain only matters once you have committed enough enchantments that picking off a single one feels pointless. As enchantment-matters lineage, the Honden cycle predates the later wave of Shrine support that rewards the same critical-mass plan with card draw, recursion, and triggers on cast; this is the original engine piece, the one that simply keeps you alive long enough for the rest to take over. The Legendary clause caps you at one copy, so you do not stack white Hondens for more life: you run the one and let the other four amplify it, which is exactly the board-state arithmetic the cycle was built to make you perform turn after turn.


