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Moxonomy

Stream of Life

SorceryX generic manaGreen mana

Lifegain in the earliest era was treated as roughly mana-neutral: pay X, gain X, with a single green pip as the tax for access. That equation has not survived contact with thirty years of design. Modern lifegain either ties the life to a body (Lone Missionary, the soul-sisters lineage, a Wurm's Tooth grinding out one point at a time), gates it behind a condition, or buries it on a creature that does three other things. A sorcery that converts mana to life at a one-to-one rate, with no rider and no incidental effect, is what the design team stopped printing once they understood that life totals are a resource you want players to fight over, not buy in bulk. The lineage that followed is visible: Congregate scaled to creatures on the battlefield, Rest for the Weary added a land-drop condition, Tendrils of Corruption married the gain to removal. Each one added a reason to cast it beyond the raw number. This is the unadorned ancestor of that whole branch, a snapshot of where green's relationship with life as a resource started: open-ended, generous, and entirely uninterested in giving the caster anything to do with the life beyond having it.

Stream of Life (9ed)
9ED · #272★uncommon
Pricing
Normal: $0.13
Foil: $1.20
Oracle Text

Rules text

Target player gains X 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
Legal
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

19 sets
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