Sheltering Prayers

The condition is the entire argument here. Shroud applies to a player's basics only while that player holds three or fewer lands, so the protection switches itself off the moment a manabase recovers and means nothing to anyone drawing land after land. That makes it a defense built exclusively for the player who is behind: the one whose lands are getting picked off by a Stone Rain or Pillage and who cannot afford to lose the next target. The symmetry of "each player" is mostly window dressing; the deck running it is the one expecting to be attacked, not the one comfortably ramping past four lands. It belongs to an era when mana denial was a real competitive pillar, a stretch when land destruction could function as a primary plan rather than a sideboard nuisance, and it answers that strategy from the cheapest possible angle. A one-mana enchantment that shields the basics keeping you alive, then quietly lapses once you no longer need them. The design is a narrow, reactive hoser wearing the costume of a generic enchantment, and its relevance was always tethered to whether anyone was actually trying to blow up your lands. This is a static effect that toggles itself on and off as the land count crosses the threshold, never a one-time payoff. Once aggressive land destruction receded as a serious plan, the condition that justified the card stopped mattering right along with it.