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One of the defining features of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Magic: The Gathering is its colour pie. Every mechanic in the g💖ame is split between white, blue, black, red, and green, with each having its own philosophical backgrounds defining what it can and ꦿcan’t do.
White is often simultaneously called one of the game’s strongest and weakest colours, depending on who you ask. A fiend for removal, and great for assembling an army, it nonetheless can struggle in a busy game of Cꦆommander thanks to its drive for ‘fair play’. Here’s everything you need to know about white in MTG, and how to🅰 make the most of it.
White’s Philosophy
White is the colour of order, community, and hierarchy. It is the colour that cares most about setting rules for the game, while also being the one most likely to stick to ideas ﷽of fairness in its own playstyle. For example, white can easily punish a greedy opponent with cards that prevent them from pushing ahead like Leonin Arbiter or Smothering Tithe, however it also lacks ways to draw lots of cards for itself.
White shouldn’t be confused for “good” or “forgiving”, though. It is the colour of removal, and can remove any type of permanent, often at a cheaper mana cost than any other colour. When white is taken ওto the extreme, it can completely shut down games and put your opponents in impossible positions – with noteworthy cards like Drannith Magistrate and Hushbringer preventing popular strategies👍 from even getting off the ground.
Aggressively, white is often about numerous, smaller creatures working together. T🐷oken decks are a hallmark of white, as are low-cost ‘white weenies’. As white is focused 🍷on the community, it is very much a go-wide strategy of hitting with lots of things, as opposed to the go-big approach you’d more often find in blue, green, or even red.
Primary Mechanics
Each colour has mechanics most commonly associated with it. As mentioned, white tends to be all about tokens, removal, and rule-setting, with many of the keywords associated with those being primary ♉to white cards.
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Mechanic |
Description |
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Lifelink |
(Damage dealt by this creature also causes you to gain that much life.) Lifegain in general is a big part of white decks. |
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Vigilance |
(Attacking doesn't cause this creature to tap.) As white generally likes to play things fairer, a lot of its primary keywords are focused on combat. |
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Double Strike |
(This creature deals both first-strike and regular combat damage.) Double strike is often seen in 'combat trick' spells, or on Auras that grant it to t🌃he creature. However, it is also found directly on creatures more than in other colours as well. |
|
First Strike |
(This creature deals combat damage before creatures without first strike.) First strike has been used less frequently than other keywords, and often it comes with a downside such as only being active when your creature is attacking, or when it is your turn. First strike beiꦛng avai🤡lable to blocking creatures is something Wizards has been doing more rarely in recent years. |
|
Flying |
(This creature can't be blocked except by creatures with flying and/or reach.) White shares flying predominantly with blue. |
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Defender |
(This creature can't attack.) Defender is less used today than it was in the e🌳arly years of the game, however we have seen it be a theme in sets like Dominaria United. |
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+1/+1 Counters |
White focuses both on giving creatures +1/+1 counters, and also on using counters in different ways (such as Resou💦rceful Defense letting you ⛄move them from permanent to permanent). |
|
"Banisher Priest Effects" |
Permanents that exile another permanent until it leaves the battlefield, such as Banishing Light, Brutal Cathar, or Leyline's Binding. You often find at least one of these in every set. |
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Permanent Removal |
White is the best colour for removal, being able to both destroy or exile just about anything. The only area it has any kind of competition for is creatures, as it tends to have conditions such as a certain toughness, whether the creature is attacking, or gives its controller something back in return (life and mana being two most common). Unconditional creature removal is found more often in black. |
|
Board Wipes |
Another similarity to black is in white's plentiful board wipes. While black usually only removes creatures, white can more completely clean a board thanks to cards like Farewell and Akroma's Vengeance. It is also the colour most associated with mass land destruction. |
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Permanent Protection |
White has lots of ways to protect its own pieces from being removed, such as giving things indestructible, exiling them and then returning them to play ('flickering'), or even phasing them out. A relatively recent addition to its repertoire has been ward as a way to protect cards, des🅰pite not having the older version hexproof available⛎ to it as a primary mechanic. |
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Enchantment Matters |
White is the colour of enchantments, with a particular focus on Auras. It has lots of ways to draw cards when enchantments are played (known as an 'Enchantress effect'). It also uses Auras for things like stat buffing and protection, and can most easily search your deck ('tutor') for enchantments. |
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Rule Setting |
Preventing players from doing certain actions, such as drawing too many cards, attacking with creatures, or casting spells from certain zones. It is also the colour most likely to use "can't lose the game" effects, such as Cloudsteel Kirin and Angel's Grace. |
|
Token Generation |
While it does share this aspect with green, white generally makes a larger number of smaller tokens, whereas green makes fewer, bigger ones. |
Key Creature Types
Each colour has two creature types heavily associated with them: their iconic creature type, which is most representative of that colour's philosophy and will often be found on splashier, rarer cards, and its characteristic creature type, its most commonly-used creature type at all rarities. For white, those creatures are Angels and Humans.
Angels
Angels are white's iconic creature type. All but one Angel in the entire game either have flying as a keyword, or have a way to gain flying built-in to the card, making it a great creature type for aggressive and evasive decks.
A large number of Angels also have numerous other keywords, meaning they lend themselves well to the 'keyword soup' deck strategy. Cards like Baneslayer Angel and Akroma, Angel of Wrath.
Humans
Perhaps more tied to white than even Angels, Humans are one of the most powerful creature types in tཧhe entire game, thanks to their large numbers and support in almost every set.
Human-focused decks are particularly popular as a result, with Humans being leading decks in both Pioneer and Modern. Many of white's best cards are Humans, like Brutal Cathar, Grand Abolisher, Drannith Magistrate, and Esper Sentinel. They're also a big part of token decks, as staples like Adeline, Resplendent Cathar and Wedding Announcement create large numbers of them incredibly easily.
Strengths
To build a powerful white deck, you're going to want to play to its key strengths: tokens, lifegain, removal, and rule-setting.
Tokens
Many of white's strongest decks are about producing a large horde of smaller creatures, and then either finding ways to buff them up, or just swing in and hope you can crush your opponent under overwhelming numbers. There's a reason why so many of white's biggest bomb cards work best with a large board state, like Akroma's Will or Wedding Festivity.
White is also good at protecting its tokens from removal, as it can easily give creatures indestructible (such as with the aforementioned Akroma's Will or Avacyn, Angel of Hope), or by using things like Teferi's Protection and Guardian of Faith to phase them out.
Lifegain
White is an excellent colour for playing defensively, thanks to its ability to gain massive amounts of life. While this won't stop you losing to a combo or an alternate win condition, being able to keep ahead of any damage your opponent deals is a great way to slow them down and, eventually stall them out completely.
Perhaps the most famous white lifegain-focused deck is Soul Sisters, which uses cards like Impassioned Orate, Soul Warden, Ajani's Welcome and Kor Celebrant alongside lots of token production to gain a ridiculous amount of life. There's also the famous combo of Heliod, Sun-Crowned and Walking Ballista to gaꦆin infinite life and deal infinite damage to yo🏅ur opponent.
Removal
Control and midrange decks are often white's bread and butter, thanks to how easily it can control the battlefield with its copious amounts of removal.
While a deck won't win on removal alone, using removal alongside other strategies is essential to victory. When you're aiming to slow down your opponent's plan, interfering with their board with things like The Wandering Emperor, Farewell, and Brutal Cathar can be enough to knock out their deck's key pieces and bring them grinding to a halt.
Rule-setting
White is the colour best suited to two of Magic's most infamous deck archetypes: 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Stax, and its little sibling 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Hatebears. Both use white's penchant for rule-setting cards to limit your opponent's actions, stripping away their resources, and potentially completely locking them out of the game.
Cards like Esper Sentinel; Thalia, Heretic Cathar; Grand Abolisher; Linvala, Keeper of Silence; Eidolon of Rhetoric, and Containment Priest a༺re all often used alongside mor🎉e traditional control strategies to force your opponent into some rough situations.
You'll usually see white buddied up with either blue or black for this kind of dec𓃲k, as those also have their own methods of cont👍rolling the game.
Weaknesses
While white is an absolute powerhouse when it comes to one-on-one games, it can sometimes struggle to keep up in multiplayer games. This has given white the unfortunate reputation as being the weakest colour in Commander, with mono-white decks being mor🎃e difficult to build effectively than othersᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚ.
Mana Ramp
'Ramp' is Magic slang that simply means gaining access to extra mana. While every colour can play one land per turn, others – like green – have ways of getting extra lands into play, letting them cast spells a lot quicker. Meanwhile, other colours, like black and red, have more plentiful access to things like rituals (spells that produce mana) and Treasure tokens.
White doesn't get much in the way of ramp, and when it does it tends to be quite minor in comparison. For example, one of the best Treasure-producing cards for white is Smothering Tithe, which is still highly conditional on your opponents both drawing a lot of cards, and also refusing to pay the price to prevent you from maki💎ng the Treasure.
Land ramp is something white has received more of in the last few years, though. Thanks to cards like Keeper of the Accord, Archaeomancer's Map, and Deep Gnome Terramancer, it does have methods of getting extra land into play, although it is still very dependent on an opponent who is themselves already ramping. White is always about fairness, so you're using these to play catch-up rather than steamroll ahead.
Card Draw
Card advantage is by far white's biggest weakness. As white is focused on having a fair game where nobody gets ahead more than anybody else, it limits how many cards it can draw per turn.
When it comes ༒to drawing cards, white limits itself in two key ways:
- Only allowing you to draw one card per turn, as seen on cards like Esper Sentinel and Mangara the Diplomat.
- "Symmetrical draw", where you and another player both draw cards, such as with Secret Rendezvous, Cut a Deal, and Alms Collector.
If you want to ensure you're keeping up with your opponents, make sure you're playing multiple sources of card draw. For example, while cards like Tocasia's Welcome, Welcoming Vampire, and a Folk Hero all only trigger once per turn, stacking these effects up will go some way to mitigate white's struggles with card advantage.