Conclave Phalanx
Lifegain that scales with the board, paid for by the board: convoke and the enters-the-battlefield trigger pull in the same direction, which is the quiet cleverness here. A wide creature deck taps its team to cast this cheaply, then gets rewarded for being wide twice over, because the life you gain counts every creature you control including the soldiers you just convoked it out with and the Phalanx itself. The effect is functionally a one-shot Soul Warden burst keyed to a board state you already wanted to develop, which makes it a natural fit for the go-wide aggressive shells that lean on token swarms or cheap creatures. The 2/4 body is built to survive the ground combat those decks invite, but nobody runs this for the stats; the appeal is the convoke discount turning a five-mana lifegain spell into something you can deploy on a crowded board for two or three actual mana while keeping the rest of your turn open. It is a tidy demonstration of why convoke and incidental lifegain belong in the same archetype: both want a full battlefield, so stapling them together asks one deckbuilding question instead of two.


