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Moxonomy

Essence Warden

Creature — Elf ShamanGreen mana

Soul Warden in green, and that color-shift is the whole point: a creature-trigger lifegain stapled onto a one-drop body, ported from its white original into a color where Elf Shamans and token swarms make the trigger fire far more often than white weenie ever could. The ability counts every other creature that enters, yours or an opponent's, by any means: cast, blinked, copied, reanimated, made as a token. That breadth is what turns it from incidental gain into an engine. In a deck built on going wide (Elf decks, populate strategies, anything that floods the board with bodies), each new creature is another point, and a single board-refill can swing a life total by double digits in one turn. The 1/1 frame does no combat work and is not asking to; it is a permanent that converts board development into life, and it stacks, so two copies double every trigger. What makes it durable is that the payoff scales with whatever your deck was already trying to do. You do not build around the lifegain; you build a creature deck and the lifegain falls out of it, which is exactly why green's go-wide archetypes have leaned on this template across decades while burn-based aggro has never found a clean answer to a Soul Warden effect that keeps the gas coming.

Essence Warden (ltc)
LTC · #242common
Pricing
Normal: $9.64
Foil:
Oracle Text

Rules text

Whenever another creature enters, you gain 1 life.
Legalities

Format Status

Standard
N/A
Pioneer
N/A
Modern
Legal
Legacy
Legal
Vintage
Legal
Commander
Legal
Pauper
Legal
Brawl
N/A
Historic
N/A
Alchemy
N/A
Timeless
N/A
Standard Brawl
N/A
More formats
Old School
N/A
Premodern
N/A
PreDH
Legal
Pauper Commander
Legal
Oathbreaker
Legal
Gladiator
N/A
Penny Dreadful
N/A
Duel Commander
Legal
Future Standard
N/A
COMPETITIVEBRAWL
N/A
TLR
Legal
Printings elsewhere

Other printings

6 sets
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