8 life for 1 mana at instant speed is now okay

>8 life for one mama at instant speed is ok
>3 damage for one mana is not

It's good but not as good as lava spike

10 life for 0 mana at sorcery speed with no conditions or string attached would barely be playable.
Cards are a valuable resource. Come back when you have a lifegain cantrip.

Yes hello my name is lifegain cantrip

>may
why the fuck wouldn't you

10 for zero would shit all over burn and agro not to mention being very powerful in decks that weaponize lifegain

Will see sideboard in pauper

There are very specific situations that almost never happen where you wouldn't want to. The card is just allowing wiggle room for those. That's all.

The 'may' is to make the game go quicker if you forget, so you can't just go "wait, i cycled a renewed faith four turns ago, I'm actually still at one"

You don't automatically gain life if you passed a mandatory effect. You get a warning instead.

casual games exist too man and if it was mandatory it would lead to a lot of bullshit arguments

This is a playable sideboard card, but it is far from "good".

MY OPPONENT HAS A RAIN OF GORE IN PLAY

I don't know enough about standard, I'm mainly into pauper and am pretty sure this will see sideboard in stompy, what deck would want to use this in standard?

Why would you play the card if your opponent had rain of gore in play?

He could be talking about Modern. Life Goes On may see play in sideboard against decks like Burn, but one-off lifegain tends to be shit on by Skullcrack and Atarkas Command, with some notable exceptions like Blessed Alliance. However, it could still see some play because of the offset mana efficiency. Life Goes On cost 1 vs. Skullcrack's 2 cost.

Life gain doesn't win you the game on its own. Throwing lava spikes at the opponents face will win you the game.

Life gain is only important if you can expended life as a resource.

The other way to think about it is: Life Goes On is only good if opp is lavaspiking you, Lava Spike does not care about what opp is doing.

You wouldn't. But if you pitch it for a different card, you won't eat two damage.

>Making yourself have card disadvantage

Feed the Clan and similar cards see play in sideboards - Life Goes On has the advantage of being one mana even if it has a rider (albeit an easy one to fulfill).

When your opponent hits 0, they die.

When you hit 100 life, you don't win.

I see this parroted a lot by you fa/tg/uys but here's the thing about life gain you're missing.

It buys you time, time for your deck to play out, time for you to recover from a potentially shitty hand or draw, or even time to stall the match for your win con to come out safely, and against burn decks life gain is nearly a hard counter because they NEED to win the game quickly before their opponents decks come online.

Counter spells are widely used for the same reasons, what's wrong with another tool in the toolbox?

Life gain is theoretically good, and does see play, but it has to be very efficient to be worth playing, and even then against decks that are as good as you or better in the late game it's not worth it, also counter spells answer threats not delay then and can be used to prevent your opponent from stopping you from killing them

Tell me how and why this is as good as lightning bolt.

Why not play fog then

I disagree. Feed the clan was a lifesaver many times against Atarka Red and just a few points of lifegain off of something like Scavenging Ooze in Modern is backbreaking to Burn. Furthermore, in my experience lifelink is also detrimental against aggro decks, as they can effectively race against an opponent who isn't even trying.
Lifegain is only pointless if it's the main feature of the deck.

Fog is basically a life gain spell equal to the damage received that turn, life gain is more efficient if the amount healed is greater than the damage prevented by fog

Also fog can't stop burn

Expensive delayed Fog.

Are you an idiot?

Are you? You're judging an entire game mechanic in a vacuum without consideration for how it can fit in to the overall framework.

I would agree that lifegain is inefficient as compared to fog usually, there are rare cases when it's better though, hopefully as wizards continues to push lifegain it will eventually become viable outside edge case scenarios

Except that can be used offensively.

I'm just leaving this here, don't mind me

Is this viable in any format? I can imagine it will be a fun deck in the future if they keep pushing life gain

You might not want to use the card that's made zero impact in any format other than easily disrupted meme decks as an example of why lifegain is good.

Let's look outside the vacuum and see what cards with pure lifegain (not lifelink because that's connected with a body that impacts the field)
Soul sisters?

not just modern burn. It's a common, so it could be a pauper sideboard card against pauper burn.

Are played in modern, legacy or standard*

Forgot to end my sentence

Thoughts about martyrproc and soul sisters?

>Is this viable in any format?
I don't think so but it's usable in EDH at least
In non-competitive, it's already fun though

Lifegain could be good with the right tools
I just wanted to post one of the best example of lifegain weaponization

I could see a standard life gain deck because of the new horse.

No reason to play a single use card instead of reusable lifegain though

It was already pretty mediocre but now that there's even more cheap things to get rid of the enablers, or just straight to their wincons of Serra Ascendant and Pridemage. Burn, the deck you would think would have the best matchup for the soul sisters, can do good against them because Eidolon laughs at their mana curve. it just can't hold up against the stronger decks.

if it said 20 life it might be playable

Cards that do nothing but give you life are still shit. You could have included a card that actually did something instead and in every situation that would be better than drawing the lifegain card.

If the card ever becomes good it's not in a lifegain deck, but a storm-like deck that wins the turn it plays the Reservoir.

>yfw life gain is the only thing that can change meta in all formats
>Imagine if they print; instant: "gain 10 life and draw a card" for GW

Well, they already did 7 life at instant speed no conditions for GW, and that was an uncommon in Invasion.

Yes but it's the cantrip that's important.
Dunno why R&D are so afraid of lifegain, it's nothing in tier 123.
Sure it's op in casual, but fuck casual, they like playing for an 1 hour.

>Those decks
>Good
lol

martyr is very oppressive to certain decks tho, and its fun

People saying lifegain is always bad are dumb sometimes gaining some life at a critical moment lets you swing back for lethal or delay enough to stabilize. Sure it does not win you the game but it can keep you from losing it too.

While I agree with you, those people are mostly right. Having lifegain cards in your deck more often than not put you in the situations that you've just described.

> combat trick to trade a creature
> combat trick to prevent losing and win the next turn

It's pretty good sideboard tech against Burn, but against anything else it won't have enough impact to be worth playing.

Didn't you know? Magic is finally a 4 color game.
Thanks MaRo!

lifegain is never good

8 life for 1 mana is a great deal but 8 life for 1 mana and a card is really only a good deal in very aggressive match ups.

damn gonna trash my tendrils now with that cheap life gain

lifegain is pretty bad beacuse 70% of the decks you'll play against it willl just laugh at it.
But against the other 30% (very fast aggro, red burn) it can be as effective as a time walk. hell no, probably resolving one of those + mediocre draw it's enough to win against a good monored burn.

it definitely gets better if you draw more than a card a turn, so if you make a green blue ramp/draw engine deck that wants to reach lategame, this card is pretty good against fast aggro decks and maybe even some midrange decks since the colors even lack good removal options.

in standard we see cards like bounty of the luxa that definitely fit the deck that would benefit from this card the most.

One LGO negates more than half of all Lava Spikes in the opponents' deck. A deck sprinkled with cheap and powerful life gain such as this becomes impervious to burn, at which point it stops winning games and being a viable strategy.

It does not have to be lava spike in the example, he's just saying that life gain is a losing strat since no matter how much life you gain it never puts you any closer to winning the game.

thats why lightning bolt is played in all formats but healing salve is mediocre at best.

It's a great sideboard card, what are you guys talking about

oh-bla-dee, oh-bla-dah

It doesn't have to be a "strategy" to be playable. Counterspelling is also no winning strategy, but considered useful and powerful. Lifegain is pretty much just burn denial.

>Counterspelling is also no winning strategy

counters trade 1 for 1 with whatever they tried to cast, often with a benefit.

Life gain only really blanks burn spells and in that case your life goes on is blanking 2-3 of their burn spells, its good not cause your gaining life but because of the card advantage you are gaining.

lifegain like almost everything in the game is only good if it can be turned into card advantage.

Lightning bolt removes the need of a creature (ideally with power >= enemy toughness) from the equation.

As much as I love card games as a medium to explore mechanics and simulate stuff.

This shit is why I hate high-level card games.

They seem to always break down into strange abstraction.

How is "1 card of mine offsets the effect of 3 of yours" not card advantage? And if you're not facing burn, you'll still have 1-2 more turns to soak attacks, delaying a potential loss and leaving space for draws and turnarounds.

Life gain has been sold pretty short. It's become a meme to blindly dismiss it as bad, when clearly OPs example is a powerful and useful card.

Reread my post, you misunderstood me.

> you'll still have 1-2 more turns to soak attacks, delaying a potential loss and leaving space for draws and turnarounds.

lets say you cast this card and gain 4-8 life, a better use of a turn and a card(the mana is not as relevant at this later stage in the game) would in most cases be to kill their most threatening creature or cast a creature to block with.

you could cast this card to gain you another turn or 2 so you can draw into a kill spell or board wipe or whatever you need but in that case why not just play more kill spells and board wipes in place of this card.

life gain is great against burn but most of the time it cant be turned into any kind of card advantage.

If anyone has ever played Hearthstone (feel free to laugh now) you'll remember the lifegain meta a few years back. It's absolute cancer, and I want no part of it taking place in MTG. Wizards has to be careful, because this is clear power creep if I've ever seen it.

I agree partially, I'd rather have card advantage than lifegain to keep me afloat. Lifelink would be more acceptable, since more often than not you need some dude in the field to swing or block, but non-reusable card isn't very good for that purpose.

I can't wait until wizards keeps making life gain stronger and stronger until it hits the main deck for the most cancerous standard possible

This card is bonkers, but probably just showed up to replace Feed the Clan in Green Pauper decks.

It's not like it was needed though, Burn is getting weaker day after day.

We had standards solely made with blue cards, I don't think lifegain meta can ever top that.

It's literally only good against burn.

Also, having life gain cards in your deck increases the chances of you drawing cards you actually need, which mean you'll more likely find yourself in situations where you NEED life gain cards to stay alive because you have cards in your deck which don't affect the board in any way. Lifegain only helps you not lose. It doesn't help you get ahead.

>Life gain has been sold pretty short.
No they haven't. They are shitty outside of very specific situation.

>increases the chances
decreases*

There are so many things about this card that upset me. Its over costed. Its overly restictive it has too much of a drawback and its impossilbe to setup. If anyone of those things were changed this spell could have been okay. The only way i could imagine this card being broken is if someone flashed doomsday in.ontop of it. So you could gaurntee the cards revealed killed you opponent.

It seems like the kind of card that was broken in playtesting so they kept nerfing it over and over, till it was just ok, then they got worried a few days before the set was finalized so they nerfed it again just to be sure

Your problem there is that you're playing to not lose, and doing so in a way that's only good against a subset of decks. Your lifegain might be good against an aggressive burn deck but what about a more midrange, value-oriented aggressive deck? What about a control deck that wants to grind you out of resources? They're absolutely giddy that you're spending tempo and cards to gain life. They aren't even worth the sideboard space generally.

If you would even considered playing a card like Life Goes On outside of the sideboard then you don't understand how magic works, it's really that simple.

Distilling those two decks down to "lifegain decks" is a disservice to what they're doing. Lifegain is an enabler to that deck, and it's still mediocre anyway.

There's only a small handful of instances where you're using a card to gain life (that didn't come from your sideboard to give burn the middle finger) and that's when it comes packaged with something else.

Like Sphinx's Revelation. Not only did this card hold off aggression, it refilled their hand with a bunch more control cards to remain ahead after playing it.

Running a card that only gains life, and nothing else, is a recipe for failure.

What kind of life gain card would be playable in main decks (outside of janky-gimmicky decks based around gaining life)?

For example, would you play:

1W
Instant
Gain 8 life.
Draw a card.

That card is amazing and very easily main deckable, its pretty broken honestly.

Cantrips tend to be the bandaid to bad cards to make them less shitty. Let's avoid them, yes?

Reduce the life gained (to 6, for example), or increase the mana cost (by W, for example)?

Well, to be fair, I was talking exactly about how to make an otherwise shitty card type (life gain by itself) less shitty.

But sure, cantrips are a bit too obvious. How about:

2W
Instant
Gain 6 life. Target creature you control gets +0/+1 and gains lifelink until end of turn.

Sounds like a draft card