This past weekend’s Magic Spotlight: Planetary Rotation was, by most metrics, a disaster. As the name suggests, this event was intended to showcase the fresh, post-rotation Standard format. Instead, it merely reaffirmed the Vivi Cauldron hellscape that we’ve been living in for months already. Outside of Mono-Red making a bit of a comeback, there were few surprises to be seen. The rise of red has changed the MTG Standard format, however, leaving room for Mono-White Lifegain to sneak back into relevance.
This is a deck that counters red’s gameplan perfectly. By gaining a ton of life over the course of a game, it can absorb red’s early aggression and turn the corner later on. While it’s not a perfect matchup, it has an edge that’s there to exploit as long as Mono-Red is prominent in the format. If you can’t beat Cauldron, and pretty much nothing can, you might as well target the next best thing.
Mono-White Lifegain In MTG Standard
The Mono-White Lifegain deck we’ll be looking at today comes via MChoq, who piloted it to a 5-0 finish in yesterday’s MTG Online Standard League. At its core, this is a very simple list. It runs a ton of ways to gain life, and a ton of cards that provide advantage each time you do.
For the lifegain package, MChoq runs Hinterland Sanctifier, Case of the Uneaten Feast, Gloryheath Lynx, and Haliya, Guided by Light. Haliya is the latest addition to the deck, and probably the most important. It serves as a continuous lifegain engine that can also draw you cards, which is crucial. There aren’t many ways for white to gain card advantage in Standard, after all. As if that wasn’t enough, you can also Warp it in for bursts of lifegain when needed. It’s no surprise that this card is spiking in price right now.
Sanctifier and Feast are less flashy, but no less important. Mono-White Lifegain really shines when you can get a critical mass of lifegain pieces in play, and these provide that for the lowest cost possible. Feast can even provide a pseudo-Yawgmoth’s Will effect if you really pop off in a single turn. While it won’t happen every game, this is another avenue for card advantage, which the deck very much appreciates.
The last lifegain source in the deck is the wildly underrated Battle Menu from Final Fantasy. This does so much for the deck it’s not even funny. Gaining four life all at once gets you a draw off of Haliya, and also gets you most of the way to solving Feast. On top of that, the other three modes are all hugely relevant, too.
Plentiful Payoffs
Of course, gaining life alone isn’t going to win you the game. To achieve that, MChoq runs a number of excellent lifegain payoffs as well.
Ajani’s Pridemate and Essence Channeler are the big ones. These are both two drops that scale up as you gain life, easily becoming huge threats in a deck like this. Curving Sanctifier or Feast into one of these is the dream, since they’ll each get a counter right away. Channeler is pretty much never going to gain Flying and Vigilance in this deck, but it does get to pass on its counters after death, which is huge.
Further up the curve, Exemplar of Light offers the same effect on a much better body, with card draw thrown in for good measure. After Haliya, this is probably the most important card in the list. The combination of an evasive, game-ending threat and a card draw engine is incredibly potent. Even if your opponent removes it, it probably already drew you a replacement.
By pairing these creatures with your continuous lifegain sources, you can play a surprisingly aggressive game with this deck. While it can’t go as fast as Mono-Red or Vivi Cauldron, the added padding of life helps you stay in the game regardless. That’s the core strategy here, and while it’s simple, it can be very effective, as MChoq’s results yesterday demonstrate.
To supplement this core plan, MChoq runs a full playset of Enduring Innocence for card draw and lifegain. Alongside Haliya and Exemplar, this helps keep things ticking along nicely. Throw in support pieces in the form of Requisition Raid and Elspeth, Storm Slayer, and you have a focused deck that’s still very much capable of solving problems. Raid can answer Agatha’s Soul Cauldron, for example, while Elspeth can take out Vivi Ornitier.
An Answer To Mono-Red?
Though it can deal with the main threats in Vivi Cauldron, Mono-White Lifegain still isn’t particularly good against the current best deck in MTG Standard. Thanks to Into the Flood Maw, Cauldron has an easy time dealing with your scaling threats. It’s also capable of going big enough to just go right over the top of everything Lifegain is trying to do.
Mono-Red Aggro, on the other hand, is an ideal mark for MChoq’s list. It’s all about getting in fast for a ton of damage, but it often runs out of steam very quickly. Mono-White Lifegain can endure the early rush thanks to all of its lifegain cards, while building up blockers in the meantime. Its creatures are all fairly small, which means they’ll struggle to keep up once your payoff creatures start scaling, too. It’s a near-ideal matchup, in other words.
I say near-ideal because there’s a massive elephant in the room for this matchup. Screaming Nemesis, a staple four-of in Mono-Red Aggro, is literally a perfect counter to Mono-White Lifegain. If it takes damage at all, it can shut your lifegain off permanently, which is essentially game over in most scenarios. Outside of Elspeth, the deck lacks any way to deal with the card. This takes the matchup from easy to tenuous in a single blow.
That said, there are ways Mono-White can overcome this problem. Glass Casket and Devout Decree are already present in the sideboard, which is nice, and you can throw in Get Lost to boot. While it may seem silly to dedicate deck slots to countering a single card, Nemesis is a big enough problem to be worth it. Once it’s out of the way, the Mono-Red matchup should be smooth sailing. Given its rapidly rising status in Standard, this is great news for Lifegain.
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