Seems like Reality Fracture will bring about a lot of life gain. It's a classic archetype that has existed for years, meaning there are a lot of directions you can go. Figured I would post this to get my thoughts straightened out and hopefully get people with more experience to chime in.
Not going to lie, summarizing a whole archetype into something digestible is a little overwhelming! So I'll start with what I associate the most with life gain Ajani's Pridemate.
These convert life gain triggers into actual board presence. The challenge is finding cards that aren't excessively narrow that you actually want to play in your aggressive deck. This seems like a good time to point out the range life gain decks can have
Archangel has combo potential, but not the good kind. Infinite life is just tedious and doesn't win the game. Kitchen Finks and Viscera Seer also get you there with Archangel, but doesn't win the game either. You would need a Goblin Bombardment or another sacrifice outlet that actually wins the game for it to be worthwhile.
Heliod also has combo lines, this one at least has the decency to end the game by machine gunning down an opponent when you give Ballista lifelink thanks to Heliod's ability.
Whether you go aggro or combo, the best way to maximize this strategy is via repeated life gain triggers. You can have some one time effects like Collective Brutality or via a lifelink creature attacking. The tried and true way though is with cards like Soul Warden that have been doing this for decades and curve perfectly with Ajani's Pridemate.
Haliya is new take on this and has the benefit of being a payoff too that works perfectly with Foods and artifacts that we'll check out later. Elas il-Kor suggests another avenue to trigger life gain, sacrifice.
This is a nice way to tie life gain into Black if you have the fodder for it. If you want to lean into the sacrifice angle, Cat Collector or Elenda's Hierophant type cards might be the best kind of Pridemates variants for you.
Susurian Voidborn triggering off artifacts opens up many new doors, the most obvious one being Food tokens.
These bridge sacrifice, life gain and artifacts neatly. You can also go deep with various combos involving cards like Hazel's Brewmaster and Ygra, Eater of All, but that's a whole post in and of itself.
But even outside of sacrifice, there is a wide range of food related cards
Green has some of the best on rate cards, but don't sleep on others like Astrid Peth.
Going back to life gain, Foods are nice because they give you a chunk of life at a time and this means you can maximize certain cards that usually trigger on 3 life
Reaching the threshold to trigger these is definitely worth the work you put in and they even have built in ways to help.
You can also turn life gain into a weapon by doming the opponent every time you get a trigger.
This supplements the aggressive life gain strategy nicely.
Life payment is probably my favorite way to make use of your life gain, be it incremental or in big chunks. Just in Black, you have these high powered cards that get even better. And if you are heavy black, don't forget Gray Merchant of Asphodel as a bonkers source of life to be recurred or blinked.
There are plenty of low to mid powered cards in this space too. In other colors
Channel and One Ring are mostly there for fun, but Library is an actual cool payoff for having a bunch of life.
Some cards care about you stockpiling life.
Speaker seems fun honestly and Reservoir is mostly a combo card that I would love to pair with Weather the Storm.
Most of what I posted above was rather heavy handed with life gain. There are some cool payoffs though that work with a single instance, transforming cards like Lightning Helix or lifelink creatures into enablers.
We mostly talked about aggressive strategies, but the cards are there for grindier decks too. The life buffer usually means you can get to the late game, letting them take over
Other colors
Red and Blue are more splashes than actual support colors, but they both have a few gems.
Ragost and Bre can really shine if you decide to splash for them. You can also pepper some life gain effects in your guild section if you do want to support life gain across all 5 colors.
Red can also use symmetrical burn to leverage your higher life total and close out a game.
These Blue cards open up a whole new avenue to explore with life gain, which is exactly what a splash should be IMO.
Although this post wasn't meant to be exhaustive, I think it does a decent job at portraying various avenues you can explore with life gain.
What jumps out to me is how deep or not you can support the archetype. You can go from a few self-contained enablers and payoffs, to some incidental life gain payoffs, to a whole dedicated archetype spanning multiple themes and colors. You can also support all different archetype theatres going from combo to control.
If I were to support this in my own cubes, I would be wary of all the life gain messing with aggro too much. Therefore, I would first turn towards life payment cards and aggressive life gain cards as the payoffs. Sacrifice, blink and Foods would also be part of the picture as a way for the theme to branch out and cross-pollinate with what the rest of the cube is doing.
How would you support life gain and what themes did I miss?
Not going to lie, summarizing a whole archetype into something digestible is a little overwhelming! So I'll start with what I associate the most with life gain Ajani's Pridemate.
These convert life gain triggers into actual board presence. The challenge is finding cards that aren't excessively narrow that you actually want to play in your aggressive deck. This seems like a good time to point out the range life gain decks can have
Archangel has combo potential, but not the good kind. Infinite life is just tedious and doesn't win the game. Kitchen Finks and Viscera Seer also get you there with Archangel, but doesn't win the game either. You would need a Goblin Bombardment or another sacrifice outlet that actually wins the game for it to be worthwhile.
Heliod also has combo lines, this one at least has the decency to end the game by machine gunning down an opponent when you give Ballista lifelink thanks to Heliod's ability.
Whether you go aggro or combo, the best way to maximize this strategy is via repeated life gain triggers. You can have some one time effects like Collective Brutality or via a lifelink creature attacking. The tried and true way though is with cards like Soul Warden that have been doing this for decades and curve perfectly with Ajani's Pridemate.
Haliya is new take on this and has the benefit of being a payoff too that works perfectly with Foods and artifacts that we'll check out later. Elas il-Kor suggests another avenue to trigger life gain, sacrifice.
This is a nice way to tie life gain into Black if you have the fodder for it. If you want to lean into the sacrifice angle, Cat Collector or Elenda's Hierophant type cards might be the best kind of Pridemates variants for you.
Susurian Voidborn triggering off artifacts opens up many new doors, the most obvious one being Food tokens.
These bridge sacrifice, life gain and artifacts neatly. You can also go deep with various combos involving cards like Hazel's Brewmaster and Ygra, Eater of All, but that's a whole post in and of itself.
But even outside of sacrifice, there is a wide range of food related cards
Green has some of the best on rate cards, but don't sleep on others like Astrid Peth.
Going back to life gain, Foods are nice because they give you a chunk of life at a time and this means you can maximize certain cards that usually trigger on 3 life
Reaching the threshold to trigger these is definitely worth the work you put in and they even have built in ways to help.
You can also turn life gain into a weapon by doming the opponent every time you get a trigger.
This supplements the aggressive life gain strategy nicely.
Life payment is probably my favorite way to make use of your life gain, be it incremental or in big chunks. Just in Black, you have these high powered cards that get even better. And if you are heavy black, don't forget Gray Merchant of Asphodel as a bonkers source of life to be recurred or blinked.
There are plenty of low to mid powered cards in this space too. In other colors
Channel and One Ring are mostly there for fun, but Library is an actual cool payoff for having a bunch of life.
Some cards care about you stockpiling life.
Speaker seems fun honestly and Reservoir is mostly a combo card that I would love to pair with Weather the Storm.
Most of what I posted above was rather heavy handed with life gain. There are some cool payoffs though that work with a single instance, transforming cards like Lightning Helix or lifelink creatures into enablers.
We mostly talked about aggressive strategies, but the cards are there for grindier decks too. The life buffer usually means you can get to the late game, letting them take over
Other colors
Red and Blue are more splashes than actual support colors, but they both have a few gems.
Ragost and Bre can really shine if you decide to splash for them. You can also pepper some life gain effects in your guild section if you do want to support life gain across all 5 colors.
Red can also use symmetrical burn to leverage your higher life total and close out a game.
These Blue cards open up a whole new avenue to explore with life gain, which is exactly what a splash should be IMO.
Although this post wasn't meant to be exhaustive, I think it does a decent job at portraying various avenues you can explore with life gain.
What jumps out to me is how deep or not you can support the archetype. You can go from a few self-contained enablers and payoffs, to some incidental life gain payoffs, to a whole dedicated archetype spanning multiple themes and colors. You can also support all different archetype theatres going from combo to control.
If I were to support this in my own cubes, I would be wary of all the life gain messing with aggro too much. Therefore, I would first turn towards life payment cards and aggressive life gain cards as the payoffs. Sacrifice, blink and Foods would also be part of the picture as a way for the theme to branch out and cross-pollinate with what the rest of the cube is doing.
How would you support life gain and what themes did I miss?
