Honden of Seeing Winds
The blue member of a five-card cycle that rewards stacking shrines, and the one that makes assembling the whole project pay off. Its draw counts every Shrine you control, so it feeds on itself: each one you add widens the spread of all of them at once, and this one in particular can turn a board of five enchantments into multiple cards every upkeep with no further investment. What balances it is the gating, because a single Honden is a sleepy five-mana enchantment that does almost nothing, while four or five together bury a slower opponent before they can answer the right permanent type. That gating, hard enchantment hate or repeated bounce, is exactly why an upkeep draw engine at this cost never broke open: the payoff lives entirely in critical mass, and critical mass is slow to assemble and fragile once disrupted. As a self-referential count-your-own-permanents design, it predates the wave of synergy-counting cards that later became routine, and it does the work cleanly: no activated abilities, no tapping, no decisions, just an escalating upkeep trigger that grows alongside its siblings. The flavor follows the function, each shrine a god whose blessing compounds in the presence of the others.



