Luxa River Shrine

A lifegain engine that asks you to pre-pay before it does anything worth the effort. Each tap of the first ability costs a mana to net one life while dropping a brick counter, and only after three of those payments does the upgraded mode unlock: a tap for two life with no further mana. Run the arithmetic and the deal is unflattering. You have spent three mana and three turns gaining three total life to access a tap that gains two more, and the engine does not scale past that breakpoint; the second ability gains the same two whether you have three brick counters or thirty. What the design is actually building is not a life total but a cadence of lifegain events: a slow, repeatable trigger source for decks whose payoffs care that you gained life at all rather than how much. The counters serve only as a self-imposed timer, gating the better mode behind the worse one so the artifact has to earn its own upgrade. It belongs to the long line of low-rarity lifegain enablers built to keep a payoff fed rather than to matter on its own, the kind of artifact that gains far too little at face value and justifies its slot only alongside cards that reward the act of gaining life itself, where each activation is a discrete trigger rather than a number crawling upward by one.