Honden of Life's Web
The keystone of the Honden cycle, and the payoff that justifies assembling all five. Each Shrine's upkeep trigger pays out more for every Shrine you control, counting itself, which turns a set of individually mediocre enchantments into a compounding engine: the green Honden produces the bodies, the red one drains, the white one gains, each one feeding the others. Read alone, this is a five-mana enchantment that makes a single token a turn, a rate nobody would run. Read as the reward for going wide on Shrines, it anchors the whole subtheme. The design tension is the cost of patience: nothing happens the turn it lands, the tokens arrive only on your own upkeep, and the snowball requires committing several enchantment slots to a plan that does nothing until it reaches critical mass. That delayed, additive payoff is the lineage this card sits in: the reward for a deck willing to spend its early turns building a board state no single card explains. The Spirit tokens are incidental fodder, fine as chump blockers, sacrifice material, or a slow swarm, but the real product is the count itself. Every Shrine you add makes this one strictly better, a rare thing to be able to say about a card that asks for so little once the engine is humming.
