Mono-White is the least powerful color in EDH, undoubtedly, but like any good noob, I have always LOVED lifegain decks.
I've been trying to make Lifegain work in EDH in SO MANY WAYS that's not all about "stall and combo" and more about gaining life to generate value through threatening creatures/creature generators/etc.
The real meat and potatoes for Lifegain decks comes from the variety of "Lifegain threats" you'll see in the decklist. They care about Lifegain, many on other peoples' turns notably, and reward you with powerful threatening creatures if you incrementally gain enough of it. It's one thing to gain a ton of life with an X-spell, but the key to a Lifegain deck comes in the increments, and Daxos does just that!
These are all the Lifegain commanders I've tried in the past that I think Daxos beats in terms of helming a PURE Lifegain deck:
-
Kambal, Consul of Allocation
, but since he's in Black the deck gets too wrapped up in dealing burn damage to win games to actually be considered a Lifegain deck.
-
Karlov of the Ghost Council
, is really truly the most powerful commander on this list... as a voltron style of deck that focuses on killing people with commander damage. He happens to do this very quickly do to incremental lifegain sources, but the deck itself doesn't care about gaining tons of life, just making Karlov big. It's not all bad, but the deck is certainly Voltron with a Lifegain subtheme, and that's not the PURE Lifegain strategy we're looking for.
-
Tuvasa the Sunlit
, more of a controlling style of deck that cycles through the library really fast and protects itself at the same time by playing defensive and lifegain enchantments. Tuvasa is legitimately the best version of lifegain I could think of for a long time, but unfortunately, the deck ends up feeling more like an enchantment "good stuff" deck with a lifegain subtheme, and that's not what I'm trying to do. We want a PURE Lifegain commander.
-
Bruse Tarl, Boorish Herder
, now this man is a powerful Magic card. But just like Tuvasa, the deck focuses too much on its own strategy of playing and protecting big creatures in order to get the double strike lifegain it needs to reach high life totals. The deck just ends up split between the two strategies of large creature beat-down and Lifegain and it feels awkward to play. So Bruse too isn't really the PURE Lifegain commander we need, but also like Tuvasa, because Lifegain is such an unreliable strategy, the deck itself is still probably stronger than many Mono-White Lifegain deck
-
Regna, the Redeemer
, exactly what I'm looking for in a lifegain commander. SHE is perfect--albeit a little costly at 6 cmc because she's a wonderful "Lifegain threat" to have access to at all times in the command zone, and can really generate an insane amount of tokens if protected properly. The problem is since
Krav, the Unredeemed
is so objectively more powerful than she is, you'd be dumb to make a Commander deck with them and not focus on the much more powerful Aristocrats strategy.
-
Darien, King of Kjeldor
, literally the day before Daxos was announced I was brewing a lifegain deck for him, and it's actually pretty great. I can honestly say that if New Daxos wasn't happening I was probably going to make my Lifegain deck using Darien over all the other options I just listed. With the ETB Lifegain abilities at Mono White's disposal, dealing damage to yourself with Darien can net you a busted amount of life, and the fact that his ability makes people not want to hit you is super useful with retaining a high life total for cards like Aetherflux Reservoir. Despite all that though, Darien himself has nothing to do with Lifegain on his card, and being as Mono White has such little draw power it's not too uncommon to have a bunch of "lifegain matters" cards on the field and not any lifegain sources. This is a huge problem, and one that New Daxos fixes perfectly.
-
Lastly, bad options would be
Gerrard Capashen
,
Patron of the Kitsune
,
Atalya, Samite Master
,
Rune-Tail, Kitsune Ascendant
, and
Linden, the Steadfast Queen
, not because they don't all emphasize lifegain in their decks, but because the first 3 are far too high costing to be consistently playable as commander tax gets higher and higher, Rune-Tail doesn't actually do anything to advance the deck's gameplan of gaining life, and Linden requires that YOUR creatures have to attack to gain life, which isn't always an option for tiny white-weenies and that means the deck might get entirely shut down if your opponents have blockers (and trust me, they do). If you ever do one of those "add an extra color" deck building challenges, adding blue to Linden for unblockability and throwing in a punch of Pridemate cards would get nuts.
-
UPDATE: Hey, so
Heliod, Sun-Crowned
is a thing. Unfortunately, if you don't make the deck a
Walking Ballista
/
Triskelion
combo deck, you're doing it wrong. Nonetheless, if you're just looking to play around with all the lifegain cards at White's disposal, he's probably your best bet for a slower deck. Daxos is a faster aggro/token deck, so it comes between choosing to run cards like
Geist-Honored Monk
or actual lifegain cards like
Shattered Angel
, so it depends on the speed of deck you like to play. If I were to guess, in EDH bigger is better, and Heliod is the better general, even without going for the combo.
