I started the article looking at any card that helped you to gain life. It didn’t take long for me to realize that this was far too wide-ranging of a topic to be a simple Top 10. Rather than expand into a Top 20, I limited the candidates instead. You won’t find any creatures on this list. Soul's Attendant and the myriad of lifelink creatures are all excellent ways to gain life, but you won’t find them here. Perhaps that will be another list in another article.

The criteria for this list are fairly open. It must be a good card with some kind of life-gain. My belief in relation to life-gain is that if you are gaining life, do what you can to keep a low profile. There are some people who attack based solely on the highest life total, so take care with how you choose to gain life.

Some of the cards on the list include life-gain mostly as an afterthought, while others offer only to make your life total a little healthier. I tend to want something more than just life, but sometimes the numbers are just too good to pass up!

Honorable Mentions

The cards included here are better than many of the cards in the actual list, but they are only better in specific decks. Devouring Greed is a spectacular life-gain card, but only in a very specific deck. Illusions of Grandeur needs Donate or Zedruu to really make it work. Tendrils of Agony is mostly known as a kill condition, but the life-gain is essential in a multiplayer game in which you may not be able to storm out the entire table. Steel of the Godhead is primarily used in Zur decks, in which it often gives the extra life cushion until things become stupid.

Another honorable mention is Sanguine Bond. Although it doesn’t gain any life on its own, it makes all your life-gain cards that much better. Your Healing Salve is now a quasi–Lightning Helix. Your 3/3 lifelink creature now does an additional 3 damage to any of your opponents. Sanguine Bond doesn’t gain life but is certainly worthy of an Honorable Mention.

Finally, I want to express my irrational love for a truly bad life-gain card. Daybreak Coronet might as well say, “Your opponents should kill this creature now and get that three-for-one advantage they were looking for.” It can only be used in very limited situations since it can only enchant an already-enchanted creature that isn’t already shrouded. I used to play an old, clunky version of a sixty-card Zur deck that regularly saw Zur with Steel of the Godhead, Daybreak Coronet, and Diplomatic Immunity. I lost him repeatedly to removal in response to Diplomatic Immunity. I saw Zur die to Wraths too many times. However, I also remember Zur gaining me 6 (or more) life after smacking someone . . . repeatedly. Bad card, but I loved it just the same.

#10 – Syphon Soul

The list starts with this old-school life-gain that is the definition of a multiplayer life-gain card. At 3 mana, you can play it early with little or no repercussion. Few players care about losing 2 life, and gaining 6 or 10 life is solid without pushing your life total up to get-him-now-or-we’ll-never-be-able-to-kill-him-when-things-are-really-ugly levels. It is also handy toward the end of the game when losing 2 more life puts one or more opponents into dies-to-anything range.

Get to know your opponents before you play it for the first time. There are a handful of players who will only attack someone who has injured them in some way. While I’m not telling you to let these jerkoffs dictate how you play, be aware of them. It would be a shame to gain the life only to find yourself unable to deal with these constant small attacks throughout the rest of the game.

#9 – Vault of the Archangel

This is an early rating for this card, so it may yet move up or down on the list. As it stands, this card is great. It is a multi-use card:

• Taps for mana;
• Kills opponents’ big creatures with all that deathtouch; and
• Gains you enough life for the life-gain to be relevant all on its own.

If you have only three creatures on the board as you reach the midgame point—a 1/1, a 2/1, and a 2/3—you are probably never going to be attacked as long as you have five lands untapped. Even when you attack, an opponent is definitely left to ponder the bad-versus-worse option when deciding how to block the deathtouch creatures. As far as life goes, you know you are gaining 5. And this assumes that you only have three small creatures! Picture as the late game progresses and some real fatties take their place on the battlefield.

5 mana is, admittedly, a heavy cost. If this card drops off the rankings, it will be because 5 mana is just too much to pay. Don’t worry that it won’t activate in the early game—you really don’t want to gain too much life too early in the game. It is the 5 mana that is the real drawback. In the end, I think it will be fine. The kind of game swings this card offers are going to be too much for it to drop off this list.

#8 – Sun Droplet

This card is devious in multiplayer. Someone is looking to attack an opponent with his Frost Titan. He looks around the board, and when he gets to the guy with the Sun Droplet, he decides it is pointless to attack. He would hit for 6 damage, but by the time his next turn comes around in a four-player game, the guy with the Sun Droplet would have only taken 2, and you would have to hit him again if you wanted him to continue to take damage.

This card is perfect for any deck that is looking to make it to the midgame. Your opponents simply will not attack you—it seems pointless.

My friend Josh would play this card in multiples in his decks. When I saw one come out, I knew I needed it gone immediately—or else no one would attack him until it was too late. The worst was when he would put a second one in play. Now when the Frost Titan hit, the 6 damage that was dealt would gain him 12 life!

The life-gain from this card is fine; it is the ability to send attacks elsewhere that puts this card in the Top 10.

#7 – Miren, the Moaning Well

The Well is the other land on the list. Lands that gain life tend to be much harder to get rid of. Most decks pack only limited land destruction, and that is saved for lands that give double strike to creatures, produce gads of mana, or involve mazes.

If your creatures are a plate of wings, the Well is like picking the bones clean. You’ve attacked or blocked or got something out of your creatures. Perhaps all that happened was that the creature forced someone to use a card to kill it. It was the juicy bites of the wings.

Miren, the Moaning Well gives you the chance to make one final use of that creature. Rather than the Wrath of God or combat damage killing it, you can swoop in and gain some life as the creature goes to the graveyard. Once Miren is finished with your creature, that chicken wing is just a slim piece of spotless bone.

Miren is also a sacrifice outlet. The next time someone is looking to steal your creature, you can sacrifice it in response. This gives you a level of protection against most blue decks and some red decks. My thanks to my other friend Josh who put me on to the benefits of Miren, the Moaning Well.

#6 – Drain Life (and Consume Spirit, Death Grasp, Corrupt, Soul Burn, and Other Cards of That Ilk)

So, I cheated and included a bunch of cards that all do basically the same thing. They can vary due to the type of mana involved, the colors to cast the card, and so on, but basically, you pay and some extra, and you get to do X damage to a creature or player and gain X life. Anthony Alongi would regularly say that the best life-gain cards are ones that do something other than just gain life. With some exceptions, I tend to agree with that statement. If all a card does is gain you life, it better get a metric ton of life for very cheap if it is going to be worthwhile.

Drain Life is an example of a card that definitely does more than just gain life. Most of the time, the life-gain will be an added bonus to getting rid of a nuisance creature or hammering away at an opponent.

The best part of Drain Life and the other do-damage-gain-life cards is the surprise factor. For most groups, Black Sun's Zenith and Genesis Wave and a variety of red X spells are the dominant X spells in the metagame. Taking out only one target with your spell is practically passé. Imagine how surprised they’ll be when your black deck does 10 or 12 damage (Thank you, Cabal Coffers and Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth!) to an opponent or a specific creature and gains you that much life! This swing is twice as much as the red spells offer since you are gaining and an opponent is losing.

#5 – Umezawa's Jitte

This is another card I hate. The counters on this card just tend to build up and up—it isn’t all that hard to do combat damage and not die once you have even 1 counter on it. While players don’t usually use it for life-gain, I’ve played against enough opponents who were at 5 life and just kept removing tokens when they were about to die. Determining how much damage you have to do to kill these players off becomes that much harder with a Jitte on the table. While that alone would be enough to make the Top 10, between proliferate decks adding counters and Power Conduits shifting charge counters from one permanent to another,¹ determining just Jitte’s life-gaining abilities is even more annoying.

#4 – Armadillo Cloak (Behemoth Sledge, Loxodon Warhammer)

Side note: the wording on Armadillo Cloak and many older creatures means the life-gain can be stacked. This means that a creature with two Armadillo Cloaks gains twice as much life as it would otherwise. A creature with a second instance of lifelink just has lifelink. This means that two Behemoth Sledges are nice, but a Behemoth Sledge and an Armadillo Cloak is better.

These cards take the wimpiest creature and make it into something fearsome . . . or at least something that needs to be considered. Green and white decks are often running smaller creatures that benefit from the pump and trample abilities, so the Cloak and Sledge are set in the colors best suited for them. Every color has some number of attacking or blocking creatures that would benefit from an equipped Warhammer. Repeatable life-gain attached to a creature is something most decks can use.

Before I move on, I want to give the Armadillo Cloak some props. So many players simply discarded the Cloak when the Sledge came out. The Behemoth Sledge stays in play when your creature dies. This resilience, along with the ability to equip it to a better creature—or an untapped creature—just made it appear so much better.

The real benefit of the Armadillo Cloak, though, lies in its ability to be attached to an opponent’s creature. Are you looking to make a friend? Add an Armadillo Cloak to one of his creatures. You are ganging up on an opponent, and the trample ability would be much better suited to one of your allies’ creatures? Suit him up. Your opponent just dropped a creature that you just can’t stop, and you know he is eyeing you up? Stick a Cloak on it. As long as the Cloak stays on that creature, you gain the life. Your opponent can choose to attack you, but you are only going to gain all the life back. He can choose to attack or defend elsewhere, but you gain the life. Keep in mind the benefit before you auto-pick the Equipment over the Aura when building your deck.

#3 – Sword of Light and Shadow

While the Sword only gives you 3 life, is anyone really going to argue that any of the cards in the #4 slot are even as good as the Sword of Light and Shadow? I know you have to do combat damage to a player to gain the life (oh, and the DUDE FROM YOUR GRAVEYARD BACK TO YOUR HAND), but getting protection from about two fifths of all the creatures in Magic should help that along. This Sword ought to be able to find at least one player in your multiplayer game who can’t block it, giving you a creature and life every turn.

In the end, I admit that the life-gain is not what this card is about; 3 life is a little bonus. However, the card gives you life consistently, and it has other amazing effects. This makes it good enough to land at #3.

#2 – Congregate (or War Report)

For only 4 mana, you get a card that leaves your opponents sagging their shoulders. I prefer to wait for someone to play a Wrath effect, and then respond with Congregate. If you are going to lose a bunch of creatures, having a life total in the upper stratosphere is a nice consolation.

The only times I’m disappointed to see these cards are early in the game before everyone has creatures out or late in the game when it is just two of us left, and there are only five or six creatures still on the battlefield.

While I’m not going to recommend War Report over Congregate, it certainly works as a second copy of Congregate in your Commander deck.

#1 – Exsanguinate

– quote from an opponent moments before playing Exsanguinate

While, technically speaking, Exsanguinate is not a Drain Life that targets multiple opponents (Drain Life can also target creatures), no one really cares. While I have a friend who likes to run Exsanguinate as a way to win with Test of Endurance, Exsanguinate is usually used as a way to finish off multiple opponents at once. If necessary, you can cast it earlier to eliminate some opponents and bring your life total back to safe ground, but once you’ve played it, you are the primary target until you are dead. If your metagame is counterspell-light, running this card will change that in a hurry. Exsanguinate dominated my playgroup for a period of time, then several players moved away from it since the wins seemed so cheesy. I can’t say that I was upset to watch it disappear (since I still don’t own one).

The problem with a Top 10 list is that it is just so small! There were several other funky cards that would have made it into a Top 20, but I’m interested in hearing about some of the life-gain cards that are popular with your group or have left you or your friends tossing your cards in frustration.

Bruce Richard

¹ This comes thanks to Jesse, another member of my playgroup.