Little Fail on the Prairie

I've already gone into detail about why lifegain is bad on previous posts, so I'm not going to get into it in detail here. Just remember the one Golden Rule of your life total: it only matters once it hits zero.



Let's say you're a white mage. A pretty hardcore one, too. Like, you won't even run any lands in your deck except for Plains. Not even awesome ones that use white mana. Just plains.

Okay.

And let's say, like a disturbingly large proportion of the playerbase, you have an irrational hard-on for lifegain. You play things like Angel's Feather and Ajani's Mantra in your deck because, dammit, if they can't keep up the damage, you're never going to die.

Too bad for you they'll find a way. They always do.

So, you want the next, best life-gain card to throw in. Well, feast your optic orbs on what you'll pass right by:

Well, for one, it's strictly worse than Ajani's Mantra. And that's not exactly a power player of a card (for those of you at home who can't detect sarcasm, Mantra is terrible). How much strictly worse? Let's see, in order to gain one life a turn, for Farmstead, you have to:

• Pay WWW
• Target a land
• Have WW available to spend waste during your upkeep
• Hope the land doesn't die/switch control

Meanwhile, with Mantra, you have to:

• Pay 1W
  

...and that's it! So not only does Farmstead not actually help you win the game you're playing, it's a drain on your resources to boot. It's like your alcoholic douchebag friend showing up at your apartment one day and refusing to leave unless you buy him a fifth of vodka in the morning. And then doing it again every day for the rest of your life.

That's it, I'm calling it.

Farmstead is a douchebag alcoholic.