Serra's Hymn
Cast it and nothing happens. That is the contract: a one-mana enchantment that sits on the battlefield doing zero work until you have fed it enough of your own upkeeps to make cracking it worthwhile. Each turn you may bank a verse counter, one at a time, with no way to accelerate the climb. When you sacrifice it, the accumulated counters become a pool of damage prevention you split across any number of targets, divided however you like. That flexible division is the reward for the wait: a single sacrifice can soak an entire alpha strike, absorbing combat damage across multiple attackers or fanning prevention across several burn spells pointed at different permanents. The accrual rate is the leash. Because the counter trigger fires only on your own upkeep, you net at most one per turn cycle, so an opponent who recognizes the engine simply applies pressure before it matures and the prevention pool never grows large enough to matter. This belongs to a five-color family of slow-burn enchantments, each color converting banked counters into a different payoff, and white's is the defensive one: a controlling tool that asks you to read the board and stockpile against a future swing rather than affect anything in the present. It is the patient inverse of the cycle's red and black entries, which spent their counters on reach and disruption.
