Essence Warden

What we do care about, though, is his main ability as acting as a green version of some all-stars like a Johnny's Pride Mate or Bloodthirsty Aerialist, cards like these that grow larger as we gain life.

And obviously this life gain can come from everywhere, and big bursts of it from something like, say, Lifelink is very useful for a deck like this, but the trick for cards like these ones here are utilizing single-instance synergies of small life gain, like the ones coming from probably the most powerful enabler in the entire deck, Essence Warden.

Essence Warden is a single green mana for a 1-1 elf shaman that gains you life any time a creature enters the battlefield on anyone's side of the battlefield.

So every time a creature enters, you'll gain one life, and Titan Bones will get two plus one plus one counters.

Other great tools that we use for incremental life gain comes from landfall triggers, such as ones like Kazandu Nectar Pot.

You might also be able to use some like nice creatures that can also help you gain life to like to kind of up your creature count up your defenses so that people don't want to attack you and still sort of get your game plan going.

yeah yeah yeah exactly just basically dialing back to that thing that i was talking about from before of like struggling to keep my life total high because it was up against three other opponents more bodies in play that could not only act as extra life gain cards but also be blockers to help ensure that that life was staying higher longer well having said that what was your card of the week oh easily the nectar pot like i mentioned that that like single single instance life game cards are the pieces that just go hand in hand with any of those uh johnny pride maids bloodthirsty aerialists uh things like that nature even like i said up to like uh uh, Archangel of food and stuff like that.

You use the single instance triggers, you know, had I found my copy of essence warden, this probably would be essence warden this spot, but nectar pot, I guess is going to be the second best choice in that.

So there's an overall arching strategy where you gain life, your creatures get really big, and you win with them.

and the engine for that is generally speaking cards like essence warden yeah that whenever another creature enters the battlefield you gain a life so therefore this triggers your creatures to get a plus one plus one counter simple isn't it well you think so but actually getting the deck to work is another matter entirely so For Rachel this was like a brand new experiment, a new deck for her and for me I was just thinking of building on existing foundations.

This was really great because actually what it meant is we were both coming at the same deck but from different directions and we both had different thoughts, ideas and we were able to put our minds together and we could try and build a deck that we wanted to play.

The only problem is that Rachel doesn't like us playing the same deck.

to a Commander Clash classic.

We have Essence Warden.

Editors hate it.

Phil loves it.

that it kind of competes with those slots.

Whereas like a top end thing, I feel like there's actually, weirdly enough, more slots available.

And that's the type of card that like, if I want more life gain in my elf deck, I would actually look at Wolverine Riders before I looked at Essence Warden, just because we're so one drop heavy.

Mm-hmm.