Foxy
- May 21, 2021
- 4 min read

A Lesson in Mortali-tea

By Michelle Martin

One lump or two?

Dina, Soul Steeper is a classic take on a witch using the life of others to cause harm to her enemies. Her first ability triggers anytime you gain life and causes your opponent to lose one life. It’s important to note here that, no matter how much life you gain, your opponent will still only lose one life which means we are not concerned with gaining a ton of life, but rather, aiming to set up systems to have multiple instances of life gain each turn. The other part of our strategy is to make sure all that life we gain is doing lots of work for us as we go.

This deck has a slow and steady type of strategy and, since we aren’t concerned with sacrificing our own creatures for incremental damage, we can actually keep our creatures around and make them into life gain machines that will have a slow-paced win condition. Of course, this doesn’t mean we aren’t ready to sacrifice our creatures, just that it isn’t our first priority.

Cards like Dogged Pursuit are not very impressive alone but, in a Dina deck, they both ping our opponents and give us consistent life gain triggers each turn that we are able to turn into more damage. Kazandu Nectarpot also pulls a lot of weight with its landfall ability gaining us life each land drop, as we hopefully draw or ramp into more lands, which shouldn’t be difficult in green with our ramp spells. We can even use a smaller flying lifelink creature like Ghastly Gloomhunter to give us a good chance of getting at least one life gain trigger each turn.

Gain to Pain Highway

Scion of the Swarm, a flyer that gets a +1/+1 counter everytime we gain life, is a perfect example of what we want to do with these many instances of life gain. As is the incredibly lovely Blood Researcher, that not only turns every moment of life gain into +1/+1 counters, but also has menace which makes it more of a nuisance to block. Mortality Spear allows us to remove a creature and costs two less if we gain life that turn.

We also want to throw around some more life loss as often as possible which means cards like Vito, Thorn of the Dusk Rose are an essential redundant piece for this strategy. Noticeably different from our commander, Vito can actually make our opponent lose the total amount of the life we gain.

We will also be taking full advantage of our green identity and playing big creatures that give us more ways to gain life, among other things. Elder Gargaroth who can gain life, draw cards and make 3/3 beast tokens will do a ton of work for us. So will other broken green beasties like Bookwurm, who will not only give us an instance of life gain, but will also let us draw a card.

Do you take honey or blood with your tea?

Dina, Soul Steeper has a second ability we haven't discussed yet, which is her ability to spend one mana, sacrifice a creature and, until the end of turn, take the power of that creature for her own. While this isn’t an ability we can easily build around given its telegraphed and brief nature, we can use this to respond to removal efforts from our opponent. The timing is a tad tricky, but if this happens before our declaring attackers step on our turn or before our declaring blockers step on our opponent’s turn, we can make our opponent face the power they were trying to avoid with removal.

Witherbloom also has ways to create Pest tokens which, when they die, will give us more instances of life gain. We have several methods of making these adorable grubs, with the incredible Beledros Witherbloom that will make us new ones at the beginning of each upkeep. Tend the Pests gives us something to do with those huge green beasts, of which we have several. If they become the target of removal, we can sacrifice them and turn their power into that many Pest tokens. These Pests will be the perfect chump blockers and sacrifice fodder to protect our actual life gain engine pieces.

This deck’s plan is a slowly heating kettle. A slow and steady drain and gain game any Magic player will have a wonderful time running. Lots of mean black removal and board wipes to keep the playing field slow and green staples making sure we have big beasties will steadily wear down our opponent. And it does all this while creating a roiling momentum that is all too prepared to boil over completely, if left unchecked.

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