What's Right in Mono-White

Posted on November 5, 2019

The Color Challenge is my attempt to make good Standard, Historic, and Brawl decks for best-of-one MTG Arena in every combination of colors. This week's Color Challenge is Mono-White.

Mono-White is the Color Challenge I feared the most. White suffers from a color identity crisis in the current Standard format. It isn't really good at aggro, control, combo, or midrange. The color is low on well-costed threats, well-costed removal, and extremely low on traditional card advantage.

Many of the best White control cards are actually Gold cards like Doom Foretold, Teferi, Time Raveler, and Oath of Kaya. Cards like Prison Realm, Conclave Tribunal, and Glass Casket are decent, but not particularly strong. They carry a significant downside for their sorcery speed casting cost. I often wonder if removing a mana cost from each of the mentioned cards would make them broken. Given the current meta, I don't think so. Sorcery speed removal with a downside of giving the creature back if removed should be powerful to see play, and in current Standard these spells are too risky and slow to justify. Because of this, control decks don't need much from White, and the idea of Mono-White Control is pretty crazy.

Midrange White decks shave pretty weak threats since Lyra Dawnbringer rotated. The best of the bunch is Cavalier of Dawn. At least this card can give you two Elks for the price of one if you have something to blow up. Cavalier of Dawn is a fine card, but you can't lean on it too much. The Elemental Knight is an unreliable way to close out games.

White's card advantage is the worst of all the colors. Black has Castle Locthwain, Red has Light Up the Stage, Green has awesome Planeswalkers and can splash for Hydroid Krasis easily. Blue has cards that say "Draw a card" on them. White gets Dawn of Hope. Before any of you run to Dawn of Hope's defense in your Ajani's Pridemate theme deck, let's be honest for a second. You have to commit two mana for the enchantment, four mana for the token, and two mana for the draw effect. On its own, for the first card, Dawn of Hope may as well read (8: Draw a card). Can anyone really defend that as a good source of card advantage? I admit it, I have a vendetta with Mono-White Lifegain strategies and with Dawn of Hope in particular. I tried it for the Color Challenge despite these concerns, and believe me when I tell you that it failed miserably!

So what does work for Mono White? If midrange and control are out, and there is no game-breaking combo in the color, we have to be aggressive. Teamwork makes the dream work! This is the part of White's color identity that is working right now. When all your cards are underpowered on their own, the best cards are those that can power up your mediocre threats! Spoiler alert; you will see Venerated Loxodon in all of the Standard Mono White lists. I thought being forced into creating aggressive, go-wide strategies would get repetitive. I was pleasantly surprised to find I could make three different White aggro decks that felt like they had their own strengths and weaknesses while being competitive overall.

Deck #1

Divine Tokens | Eldraine Standard | CGB 10-29-2019

Sorceries (4)
4 Finale of Glory

Enchantments (3)
3 Divine Visitation

Artifacts (4)
4 Heraldic Banner

Lands (24)
20 Plains
4 Castle Ardenvale

Divine Visitation has been a janky theme and meme card since it was introduced. It was a casual favorite, so I had low expectations for this aggressive token-themed build. It outperformed expectations by a lot.

Heraldic Banner played a role similar to Venerated Loxodon in making all of your mediocre threats into respectable threats. What I didn't expect to find was how helpful the additional mana was. A curve of Hunted Witness, Tithe Taker, Heraldic Banner, Divine Visitation is no joke. The extra mana from banner makes your Finale of Glory's larger, and there is a big difference in every extra creature you make with that card.

Here is another card you will see in every single White deck. When combined with Divine Visitation, this card is an Angel factory. It used to be that one of the great short-comings of Divine Visitation was that by the time you cast it, you wouldn't have anything that makes tokens, leaving the card is a horrific fail-state. If you draw a Castle Ardenvale at any point, you don't run out of ways to make vigilant flying 4/4's. This adds a lot to the deck's consistency and resilience. Divine Visitation may be a 5 mana enchantment that doesn't affect the board, but it is an enchantment, and enchantments don't get turned into Elks or get killed by Noxious Grasp.

Deck #2

Savage Cookie | Eldraine Standard | CGB 10-31-2019

Planeswalkers (3)
3 Gideon Blackblade

Artifacts (6)
2 Manifold Key
4 Glass Casket

Of all the decks I tried, I don't think any deck had a lower individual power rating for cards than this one. Locthwain Gargoyle, Inquisitive Puppet, and Manifold Key in an aggro deck are not what I expected to be playing in Standard. In my video I described one of my games as a terrible game of Limited, as I beat down with a 2/3 flying Locthwain Gargoyle turn after turn during a board stall. But remember, at least for White at the moment, teamwork is the only way to make this dream work!

All That Glitters, Steel Overseer, and Venerated Loxodon do what they can to make the one-mana artifacts into playable Magic cards. Gingerbrute is a decent evasive threat when you throw All That Glitters on it. Gideon Blackblade can do a cool trick with Steel Overseer by giving it Vigilance with the [+1] ability so that the artifact creature can attack and pump itself and other artifact creatures. The deck is incredibly reliant on a good start to the game with plays on turn one, two, and three, so mulligan aggressively.

Deck #3

Mono-White Aggro | Eldraine Standard | CGB 10-31-2019

Planeswalkers (2)
2 Gideon Blackblade

Artifacts (4)
4 Heraldic Banner

Lands (22)
18 Plains
4 Castle Ardenvale

Lee Shi Tian played a similar deck in Fandom Legends back on October 3, and I have busted it out now and then ever since. The deck has a surprisingly good matchup with Simic and Bant Food decks because of how quickly it can go wide and make a strong board. The evasion from Faerie Guidemother and Loyal Pegasus is no joke, and one of the toughest things to figure out is when to play Faerie Guidemother and when to save her for the Adventure spell.

The deck doesn't run slow and fragile removal spells like Glass Casket and Conclave Tribunal. Instead, it runs the very fragile and mana-intensive tappers, Giant Killer and Law-Rune Enforcer. This deck has four copies of Heraldic Banner, and this is a spot where the extra mana is very nice. These tapper critters are great for getting in points of damage early and clearing the way for lethal attacks late, but you need mana to use them. Heraldic Banner provides the mana while also buffing the team.

Some of you incredibly competitive types may scoff at the Limited-level cards I am playing to make these Mono-White decks work, but I'll have you know I have had multiple 7-0 Standard Events on MTG Arena with Lee Shi Tian's Mono-White Aggro list and those things pay out better rewards than making Mythic rank. After a week of doing all I could to cast Venerated Loxodon on three, here are my power rankings for the decks:

Mono-White Aggro - Simple but effective, and much stronger than it looks.

Divine Tokens - Decks that can't remove an enchantment are in trouble.

Savage Cookie - When you look at an opening hand with Locthwain Gargoyle, Inquisitive Puppet, and an aura spell that dies to removal, and say "I guess I keep", you know your strategy is fragile.

Next week I will cover Mono Red decks in Standard, so get ready to melt some face. Here are some bonus Mono White deck lists for Historic, Brawl, and budget-focused brewers.