Light from Within

Chroma counted mana symbols on permanents rather than total mana spent, and this anthem is the purest payoff that idea ever produced. The reward scales not with how many creatures you control but with how committed to white each of them is: a single-pip one-drop gets +1/+1, a card with two white symbols gets +2/+2, and a wholly white-intensive board swells far past what a flat lord could promise. That makes it an anthem that punishes color-splashing and rewards purity, the same design conversation that resurfaced years later when devotion formalized the symbol-counting Chroma pioneered. The discipline is built into the static buff itself: a board of off-color creatures gets nothing, so the card demands a mono-white commitment that Crusade or Honor of the Pure never asked for. Where those anthems hand every creature a uniform bonus, this one stratifies the team, and the better your deck is at flooding the board with double-pip white bodies, the more it outpaces any fixed-number lord. It is a static enchantment with no body of its own, no protection, and no relevance until creatures hit the table, which leaves it fragile in exactly the way a flat anthem is. But the ceiling is the appeal: in a board built to its specification, the math gets out of hand fast.