Ajani Says White has Cards Too

Ah, White, the most shafted color in all of Magic. These days the only times I see people playing white is as a splash because they are forced by gold cards, if it's an exile enchantment, or if it's one of the board clears it can provide. Whatever happened to the color of taxes, proactive denial, and interesting symmetrical mechanics? Whatever happend to Humility and Palace Jailer? We have nothing of the sort here, but we can try our hardest to make White try to shine through with the one extremely boring mechanic Wizards insists on giving to White: Lifegain!

It feels weird talking about the color white, and the power level of said color in the current political climate. I don't know if it's just me, but the phrase "white's power level" just feels a little off, probably because the words "white" and "power" should never be in the same sentence, ever. Except maybe if admonishing people who use that phrase. Anyways, this is a monowhite deck, flying in the face of every so-called expert who says this color is garbage.

Lifegain Synergies:

White may not have the breadth of playstyle options that all of the other colors can provide, but what it gives us is a lot of pretty bad redundancy. So we went for the most obvious synergy our commander could have with lifegain. We have the excellent Dawn of Hope to draw us cards and make us lifelinkers, it's an excellent engine in this deck. Charming Prince's versatility makes him a nice inclusion in this deck, letting us get extra value from our ETB effects, gain life, or fix our draws when we need. We run one Ajani's Pridemate to let em know what our deck is all about, and a snowball with both Impassioned Orator and the pridemate can lead to a quick aggressive win. Because we are in Brawl, Angel of Vitality becomes quite a good card, as a 4/4 flier for 3 with upside can bring this deck to whole new levels. We run Linden, the Steadfast Queen because we can't ever be too redundant, and Gideon's Company and Twinblade Paladin as our later-game beaters that grow as we gain life. Finally, we run a Loxodon Lifechanter because that card looks so cool it's such a glorious Loxodon! And we can also make him enormous for one huge swing later on with all our life.

Removal:

Well, when we ran out of good lifegain cards, all we could do is go to White's second 'theme': removal. We run Giant Killer to slow down aggro and kill big creatures, Pacifism to lock down a difficult creature, Glass Casket, Prison Realm, and Conclave Tribunal to all get different levels of threats at different stages of the game. We have a Hanged Executioner as a way to produce tokens and as on-board removal, and The Wanderer to exile big creatures and protect us from direct damage. We run Cavalier of Dawn because he is simply bananas strong, and the amazing board clears of Realm-Cloaked Giant and Planar Cleansing.

Denial:

While we don't have the best forms of proactive denial available to us right now, we still try our best to make sure white is expressing the proper annoying themes it was always meant to embody. We run Grafdigger's Cage to deal with reanimator decks and early cat openers, and Apostle of Purifying Light for the same reason, yet with a body. Tomik, Distinguished Advokist is here to shut down the annoying Nissa, Who Shakes the World decks, and Tithe Taker should help us deal with people trying to counterspell us. Forbidding Spirit and Archon of Absolution are here to keep us alive against wide and aggressive strategies, and Smothering Tithe should help us punish the more controlling strategies. We are White, and our job is to keep everyone fair, and remind them that everything should be in perfect balance.

Other Wincons:

Sometimes we can't convince our opponents to play fair, so we gotta beat them down. For this we have Gideon Blackblade to help us with the early snowball starts, and later on we can have all out tokens become rather powerful with Divine Visitation. Angel of Grace can be a powerful beater and can save us if we are on the back foot, and Ugin the Ineffable can sometimes carry the game all byt himself. We run one Finale of Glory in the off chance that we can make a ton of mana, and kill our opponent with tons of big scary tokens.

Mana:

While white is terrible at ramping, we tried our darndest to get cute with it and make sure this deck has as many reasonable ramp options as possible. We run Arcane Signet, Heraldic Banner, and Spinning Wheel as mana rocks, due to their mana cost and extra value they add. We have the cheeky Brought Back + Lotus Field combo, though pretty bad when they are one-ofs, you can feel real cool pulling it off on turn 3 or just save the Brought Back as a sick trick after your opponent has removed some of your permanents. For lands, we have access to a variety of utility lands. I'm not running as many as I could, and you could probably run more but I didn't want to go too nuts here. We have Mobilized District, Blast Zone, and Karn's Bastion as our colorless utility, and while they all do something for the deck, it is Castle Ardenvale that is the true star in the mana base, as it provides us with continuous board presence late in the game. We also run one Cryptic Caves and one Emergence Zone, because we can.