FlowerSunRain
Contributor
A couple of Cube threads have mentioned using Life Gain as a Thing and I was wondering if it could work. At first, I was extremely skeptical, but now I am actually starting to believe this could be a fun theme in Black/White that doesn't need very much support to make happen as many of the cards that work in it are already around and most of the rest are pretty applicable. Here's my outline.
Why Life Gain?
There are three main reasons to why you might want to gain life in a game of Magic:
1) To not die
2) To pay for awesome stuff that costs life
3) To trigger effects that specifically rely on gaining life
Reason 1 is fairly simple and very reasonable. Just about any deck could benefit from some life gain so long as the form the life gain comes in is useful. Cards do that do nothing but gain have a poor scope, but many, many cards gain life while doing something you want to be doing anyway, so why not take it?
The design concern here, though, is that extra life doesn't protect you equally from all threats. Life gain is by far best against fast, burst damage and almost useless against pure control, so when adding lifegain cards, be sure to consider the plight they create for those bursty decks.
Reason 2 is less simple, but just as reasonable. Lots of good magic cards cost life to use, so if you gain life you can use more of them or use repeatable ones more often, as long as you don't need the extra life to avoid dying. These cards are interesting because they allow you to design your deck around having extra life and leveraging it against your opponent in a way that a deck without any lifegain would be unable to without putting itself in a losing position.
Reason 3 is very narrow. Cards that rely specifically on lifegain are moderately to completely poisonous and mostly don't have a particularly impressive payout, so they need to be looked at extremely carefully before being included. No lifegain them in cube can reasonably be supported on this principle, however there are a few cards in this category that are worth considering.
How to Gain Life?
I'm going to split these into two main categories:
1) Incidental Life Gain
2) Life Gain Engines
Incidental lifegain are effects that generate some life when they are used. You are only going to include thee types of cards if they already align with your gameplan, so these will never be the focal point of a lifegain themed deck. They with the exception of pure lifegain cards, which you probably aren't running and really don't want to (except for maybe Zuran Orb), these cards all go into lots of decks and add extra value to a lifegain theme deck.
You probably know a lot of good cards that fall into this category. Any creature that gives life when it ETB or dies, any spell that gives life along with something else goes here. You are probably already running a fair number of these.
Life gain engines are a source of repeated lifegain that you can use to repeatedly utilize life payment cards or trigger lifegain reliant effects. These engines come in different forms and as a result can be put into a variety of decks to gain advantages.
Lifelink Creatures: A simple engine, lifelink creatures gain you life every time they attack or block. Many of them are well costed to boot. Vault of the Archangel, Loxodon Warhammer and Batterskull are all nice sources of lifelink.
Creature Recursion: Bottle Gnomes, Lone Missionary, Grey Merchant of Asphodel and so on can repeatedly generate life if you have a way to bring them back. Cards that gain life by sacrifice are easier to get into the graveyard, but cards with ETB effects can be blinked for additional life.
ETB/Death Triggers: Soul Warden, Blood Artist, Falkenrath Noble, Kalastria Highbornand their ilk all repeatedly gain you life. Combining with token producers can create a larger or permanent source of life gain. Some of these engines can also double as your win condition.
Extort: An extort creature will give you life with every spell you cast. This combines extremely well with corpse dance (buyback!).
Planeswalkers: Elspeth Tirel, Ajani Goldmane, Sorin Markov and Sorin, Lord of Innistrad all generate life repeatedly with loyalty positive abilities.
Trading Post: When combined with a source of extra cards, this can become an amazing source of card advantage.
Repeated Lifegain enchantments: These are a little narrow, but Exquisite Blood and Path of Bravery can both generate huge amount of life while doing things you probably want to be doing anyway.
Conveniently, all of these things are available in black/white making them the primary colors for this gameplan.
How to Leverage It
Many of these lifegain effects also contribute actively to ending the game. Lifelink creatures attack the opponent, extort gains them, blood artist and friends tax, planeswalkers do silly things and creature recursion may all eventually exhaust an opponent, but gaining life does allow a player to get lots of use out of some effects that may really make this deck shine.
Card Draw: Besides the usual Phyrexian Arena and Dark Confidant everyone runs, you can go deeper. When you are gaining life, you can play Graveborn Muse with more zombies then other decks might dare. Erebos, God of the Dead's upside seems much better. Greed is not bad. Necropotence gets downright silly. Skeletal Scrying is a discount stroke of genius. These cards, with a cushion of life, simply generate obscene amount of card advantage that will win you just about any winnable game.
Other Life Based Engines: Phyrexian Reclamation is an amazing engine that synergizes hugely with recursion based life gain. Strands of Night works similarly, but requires swamps.
Symmetrical Life Loss: Shephard of Rot and Pestilence are marginal cards on there own, but in a deck with a life gain engine, they are much more potent as win conditions, and in Pestilence's case, repeatable removal.
Cards that Care About Your Life Total: These are very poisonous cards and on top of that, most aren't even that good. The only ones I would look at are Path of Bravery for a creature/token based path or Divinity of Pride if you want a more restrictive Baneslayer. Both of these are fairly useful even before they trigger and have reasonable trigger points, unlike, Serra Ascendant who you shouldn't even bother thinking about.
Cards that Trigger When You Gain Life: I would ignore most of these, but Sanguine Bond is interesting in that it turns any lifegain you have into your win condition. Its completely poisonous and will often just be a winmore if you are on the lifelink plan or have a full recursion engine.
The most interesting of these cards is easily Ajani's Pridemate. It is easy enough to play on curve, grows on any life gain without needing to plan around it or build an engine for. Any white, aggressive deck with any sort of lifegain can play this and get a fine animal.
Archangel of Thune is just plain good so it doesn't even matter.
What Do You Need?
The token plan needs token creators and anthems. Black does not always run much in the way of token makers, but Bloodline Keeper, Xathrid Necromancer, Ophiomancer, Cemetery Reaper, Bitterblossom, Curse of Shallow Graves and Wakedancer can all contribute. Pawn of Ulamog also exists, but I've never played it.
Sac Outlets are an absolute must for any sort of creature recursion engine. I highly recommend High Market and Phyrexian Tower, along with some in black. Gutless Ghoul is not a tier one card, but he is solid roleplayer here. Some combination of Carrion Feeder, Nantuko Husk, Mind Slash, Attrition, Braids, Cabal Minion, etc will help. Red can lend a hand with Falkenrath Aristocrat and Goblin Bombardment. Trading Post is perfect and Blasting Station is decent too.
Recursion is an obvious must. Gravecrawler, Reassembling Skeleton, Brood of Cockroaches, Bloodghast as well as cards that bring back creatures are all going to be needed.
If you are in on the Kalastria Highborn plan, you will need a couple of vampires. Consider making a couple of creatures with irrelevant creature types honorary vampires. Thrull Parasite definitely looks like a vampire to me and helps out if you want to go with the extort plan.
The cardpool for extort is very shallow, but with a little rebound, retrace, flashback and buyback you can generate a lot of value if you don't get disrupted. I would not attempt to plan a deck around this path and simply include the better cards as sweeteners for the other approaches. A Syndic of Tithes can give a token deck extra reach or a recursion engine bite if you can afford the one mana per turn.
Pestilence is probably a terrible card for any of these decks as they all rely on creatures, but I'm tempted to run it anyway as its one of my favorite cards and see what happens.
For Shepard of Rot you need zombies. Its a narrow win condition and probably not worth a slot, but if zombie aggro or a gravecrawler plan is a thing, it might not be terrible.
Bottle Gnomes. Just do it. You'll thank me later.
Why Bother?
Besides a couple of very narrow picks, most of the cards you will include here have excellent crossover into other decks. Sacrifice, recursion and direct damage are all valuable in lots of decks. Pay to draw cards are still useful without gaining lots of life. The advantage to investing in the theme is being able to take better advantage of these cards in a synergistic fashion, but in small doses these cards are still valuable to other decks.
It would seem that a lifegain theme would be unduly harsh on bursty decks, while soft on control decks, but the deck construction process seems to suggest otherwise. The engine decks have a lot of moving parts that need to get going, so the lifegain serves as a strong buffer that will hopefully give them time to set up with their individually less efficient cards and life expensive resources. On the other hand, lifegain which is normally of limited worth against controlling decks is worth a great deal more when it is converted into massive card advantage. Controlling decks might not care that you gained ten life, but they do care that you've drawn 10 extra cards.
The decks that come out of this theme seem like they will be varied and fun.
How does it Actually work?
I'm not sure yet, but I'm going to try it out. I've been in a card gathering frenzy to put this idea together, so once I do, stay tuned to my cube thread and I'll keep you posted. There you will see an actual list that takes this idea and runs with it so you can get a sense of how well it works, how poisonous it turns out to be and if it is as awesome as I think it might be.
Why Life Gain?
There are three main reasons to why you might want to gain life in a game of Magic:
1) To not die
2) To pay for awesome stuff that costs life
3) To trigger effects that specifically rely on gaining life
Reason 1 is fairly simple and very reasonable. Just about any deck could benefit from some life gain so long as the form the life gain comes in is useful. Cards do that do nothing but gain have a poor scope, but many, many cards gain life while doing something you want to be doing anyway, so why not take it?
The design concern here, though, is that extra life doesn't protect you equally from all threats. Life gain is by far best against fast, burst damage and almost useless against pure control, so when adding lifegain cards, be sure to consider the plight they create for those bursty decks.
Reason 2 is less simple, but just as reasonable. Lots of good magic cards cost life to use, so if you gain life you can use more of them or use repeatable ones more often, as long as you don't need the extra life to avoid dying. These cards are interesting because they allow you to design your deck around having extra life and leveraging it against your opponent in a way that a deck without any lifegain would be unable to without putting itself in a losing position.
Reason 3 is very narrow. Cards that rely specifically on lifegain are moderately to completely poisonous and mostly don't have a particularly impressive payout, so they need to be looked at extremely carefully before being included. No lifegain them in cube can reasonably be supported on this principle, however there are a few cards in this category that are worth considering.
How to Gain Life?
I'm going to split these into two main categories:
1) Incidental Life Gain
2) Life Gain Engines
Incidental lifegain are effects that generate some life when they are used. You are only going to include thee types of cards if they already align with your gameplan, so these will never be the focal point of a lifegain themed deck. They with the exception of pure lifegain cards, which you probably aren't running and really don't want to (except for maybe Zuran Orb), these cards all go into lots of decks and add extra value to a lifegain theme deck.
You probably know a lot of good cards that fall into this category. Any creature that gives life when it ETB or dies, any spell that gives life along with something else goes here. You are probably already running a fair number of these.
Life gain engines are a source of repeated lifegain that you can use to repeatedly utilize life payment cards or trigger lifegain reliant effects. These engines come in different forms and as a result can be put into a variety of decks to gain advantages.
Lifelink Creatures: A simple engine, lifelink creatures gain you life every time they attack or block. Many of them are well costed to boot. Vault of the Archangel, Loxodon Warhammer and Batterskull are all nice sources of lifelink.
Creature Recursion: Bottle Gnomes, Lone Missionary, Grey Merchant of Asphodel and so on can repeatedly generate life if you have a way to bring them back. Cards that gain life by sacrifice are easier to get into the graveyard, but cards with ETB effects can be blinked for additional life.
ETB/Death Triggers: Soul Warden, Blood Artist, Falkenrath Noble, Kalastria Highbornand their ilk all repeatedly gain you life. Combining with token producers can create a larger or permanent source of life gain. Some of these engines can also double as your win condition.
Extort: An extort creature will give you life with every spell you cast. This combines extremely well with corpse dance (buyback!).
Planeswalkers: Elspeth Tirel, Ajani Goldmane, Sorin Markov and Sorin, Lord of Innistrad all generate life repeatedly with loyalty positive abilities.
Trading Post: When combined with a source of extra cards, this can become an amazing source of card advantage.
Repeated Lifegain enchantments: These are a little narrow, but Exquisite Blood and Path of Bravery can both generate huge amount of life while doing things you probably want to be doing anyway.
Conveniently, all of these things are available in black/white making them the primary colors for this gameplan.
How to Leverage It
Many of these lifegain effects also contribute actively to ending the game. Lifelink creatures attack the opponent, extort gains them, blood artist and friends tax, planeswalkers do silly things and creature recursion may all eventually exhaust an opponent, but gaining life does allow a player to get lots of use out of some effects that may really make this deck shine.
Card Draw: Besides the usual Phyrexian Arena and Dark Confidant everyone runs, you can go deeper. When you are gaining life, you can play Graveborn Muse with more zombies then other decks might dare. Erebos, God of the Dead's upside seems much better. Greed is not bad. Necropotence gets downright silly. Skeletal Scrying is a discount stroke of genius. These cards, with a cushion of life, simply generate obscene amount of card advantage that will win you just about any winnable game.
Other Life Based Engines: Phyrexian Reclamation is an amazing engine that synergizes hugely with recursion based life gain. Strands of Night works similarly, but requires swamps.
Symmetrical Life Loss: Shephard of Rot and Pestilence are marginal cards on there own, but in a deck with a life gain engine, they are much more potent as win conditions, and in Pestilence's case, repeatable removal.
Cards that Care About Your Life Total: These are very poisonous cards and on top of that, most aren't even that good. The only ones I would look at are Path of Bravery for a creature/token based path or Divinity of Pride if you want a more restrictive Baneslayer. Both of these are fairly useful even before they trigger and have reasonable trigger points, unlike, Serra Ascendant who you shouldn't even bother thinking about.
Cards that Trigger When You Gain Life: I would ignore most of these, but Sanguine Bond is interesting in that it turns any lifegain you have into your win condition. Its completely poisonous and will often just be a winmore if you are on the lifelink plan or have a full recursion engine.
The most interesting of these cards is easily Ajani's Pridemate. It is easy enough to play on curve, grows on any life gain without needing to plan around it or build an engine for. Any white, aggressive deck with any sort of lifegain can play this and get a fine animal.
Archangel of Thune is just plain good so it doesn't even matter.
What Do You Need?
The token plan needs token creators and anthems. Black does not always run much in the way of token makers, but Bloodline Keeper, Xathrid Necromancer, Ophiomancer, Cemetery Reaper, Bitterblossom, Curse of Shallow Graves and Wakedancer can all contribute. Pawn of Ulamog also exists, but I've never played it.
Sac Outlets are an absolute must for any sort of creature recursion engine. I highly recommend High Market and Phyrexian Tower, along with some in black. Gutless Ghoul is not a tier one card, but he is solid roleplayer here. Some combination of Carrion Feeder, Nantuko Husk, Mind Slash, Attrition, Braids, Cabal Minion, etc will help. Red can lend a hand with Falkenrath Aristocrat and Goblin Bombardment. Trading Post is perfect and Blasting Station is decent too.
Recursion is an obvious must. Gravecrawler, Reassembling Skeleton, Brood of Cockroaches, Bloodghast as well as cards that bring back creatures are all going to be needed.
If you are in on the Kalastria Highborn plan, you will need a couple of vampires. Consider making a couple of creatures with irrelevant creature types honorary vampires. Thrull Parasite definitely looks like a vampire to me and helps out if you want to go with the extort plan.
The cardpool for extort is very shallow, but with a little rebound, retrace, flashback and buyback you can generate a lot of value if you don't get disrupted. I would not attempt to plan a deck around this path and simply include the better cards as sweeteners for the other approaches. A Syndic of Tithes can give a token deck extra reach or a recursion engine bite if you can afford the one mana per turn.
Pestilence is probably a terrible card for any of these decks as they all rely on creatures, but I'm tempted to run it anyway as its one of my favorite cards and see what happens.
For Shepard of Rot you need zombies. Its a narrow win condition and probably not worth a slot, but if zombie aggro or a gravecrawler plan is a thing, it might not be terrible.
Bottle Gnomes. Just do it. You'll thank me later.
Why Bother?
Besides a couple of very narrow picks, most of the cards you will include here have excellent crossover into other decks. Sacrifice, recursion and direct damage are all valuable in lots of decks. Pay to draw cards are still useful without gaining lots of life. The advantage to investing in the theme is being able to take better advantage of these cards in a synergistic fashion, but in small doses these cards are still valuable to other decks.
It would seem that a lifegain theme would be unduly harsh on bursty decks, while soft on control decks, but the deck construction process seems to suggest otherwise. The engine decks have a lot of moving parts that need to get going, so the lifegain serves as a strong buffer that will hopefully give them time to set up with their individually less efficient cards and life expensive resources. On the other hand, lifegain which is normally of limited worth against controlling decks is worth a great deal more when it is converted into massive card advantage. Controlling decks might not care that you gained ten life, but they do care that you've drawn 10 extra cards.
The decks that come out of this theme seem like they will be varied and fun.
How does it Actually work?
I'm not sure yet, but I'm going to try it out. I've been in a card gathering frenzy to put this idea together, so once I do, stay tuned to my cube thread and I'll keep you posted. There you will see an actual list that takes this idea and runs with it so you can get a sense of how well it works, how poisonous it turns out to be and if it is as awesome as I think it might be.
