Words of Worship

The conversion rate is the whole story, and it is a punishing one: pay a mana to turn your next draw into five life. A card is the most precious resource in the game, and giving one up for life total only makes sense when the life matters more than whatever the draw would have been, which is why this enchantment lived as a reactive hedge against burn and fast pressure rather than a maindeck staple. What holds the design up is the timing window it asks you to thread. The replacement applies to "the next time you would draw a card this turn," so the toggle is yours to flip at the moment of activation: your draw-step draw, a cantrip mid-turn, or any extra draw can become five life, or none of them, depending on what the board demands when you reach for the mana. That standing, mana-gated control over your own draw step was the structural idea its whole cycle of "Words of" enchantments was probing, an early attempt to let players intervene in a part of the turn that had always run on autopilot, with each color member rewriting the next draw into a color-appropriate effect and this one taking life. Wizards has revisited the notion of taxing or rerouting card draw in various shapes since, but the appeal here has stayed narrow and specific: a recurring life buffer for decks that can spare both the mana and the cards to feed it.