Zealots en-Dal
A monocolor tax dressed up as a reward. The upkeep trigger only fires if every nonland permanent you control is white, which turns the body into a deckbuilding contract: stay pure, and you accrue a point of life each turn; splash a single artifact mana rock or off-color creature and the engine goes dark. That conditional is the whole design. Exodus belonged to the Rath block, whose allegiance subtheme paid players for committing hard to a single color rather than greedily reaching for the best card in every slot. The frame is the tell that the body was never the point: a 2/4 defensive blocker priced to survive while the lifegain accumulates, not to pressure anything. The card sits in a lineage that tries to make purity its own incentive, a lever Wizards has pulled in different shapes across the years without ever landing on a rate that makes the discipline worth the lost flexibility. Because the trigger checks the board only when your upkeep begins, even a temporarily non-white permanent that resolves on an opponent's turn shuts the faucet off until you clean it up. One life per turn is a modest carrot for a strict requirement, which is precisely why allegiance payoffs of this generation read more as flavor statements about loyalty than as cards built to win games.
