The Ascent of White

 

White has never been a bad colour so to speak. As the meta undulates it is often one of the most powerful colours in cubes, or at least un-powered ones. Having premium removal and top quality cheap dorks goes a long way to making you good in cube. What white has always been however is painfully dull. No card draw plus few choices on what to do and interactive plays beyond what on and when to use removal will make for a relatively dull play experience. That is changing, and rapidly, and white is now both very powerful and a lot of fun to play. It has far more identity and direction. Back in the day the thing one most associated with the colour is gaining life or giving protection. Dull and narrow things. These days we have more involved identities like flicker, returning from the bin, or equipment. Most importantly however we have now have lots of choices and lots of ways to draw cards. Generally pretty well designed cards that feel like they are well within the colour identity. A lot of these are to be found in the various commander products over the last few years but certainly not exclusively. Commander product does also seem to be a bit of a testing ground for things. Much that is tried out there comes to standard magic at some point in some form or other. 

For comparison against what white has been getting recently  I was trying to think of the white cards that I like most in Magic that are at least somewhat cube playable that predate this recent swell of cool stuff getting printed. The list is not long and explains a lot about why I played less white than other colours and considered it dull. It is pretty embarrassing that this list of just over ten cards are what I consider to be the highlights of a colour for over two decades of releases. Those lucky few are as follows;

Tithe

Land Tax

Mana Tithe

Thraben Inspector

Reconnaissance  

Icatian Javelineer 

Sunscape Familiar (really not a white card)

Battle Screech 

Wing Shards

Cast Out

Kor Skyfisher

So then, let us start making some lists of some new white cards that are powerful or interesting, or ideally both. The first main gripe I, and many others, have about white is, or was, the lack of card advantage. It was very hard to directly draw cards in white and even pseudo value generating effects like making a token dork each turn or just mana sinks tended to be underpowered and under represented. Even as token production got better, mainly with planeswalkers arriving, it still is a bit dull. Just making small vanilla tokens wins games very slowly, if at all, and solves very few problems. It doesn't stop you losing to really anything or disrupt in anyway or buy you that much time. White now has plenty of more exciting pseudo value cards like escape stuff and ways to dig into the deck for dorks but it also just has direct means to draw cards. Here is a list of the best new value tools white has to play with. 

Staff of the Storyteller 

Whiteplume Adventurer

Bennie Bracks, Zoologist 

Glimmer Lens

Kayla's Music Box

Scolar of New Horizons

Esper Sentinel

Wedding Announcement 

Serra Paragon

Recruitment Officer 

Welcoming Vampire 

Elspeth, Sun's Nemesis

Brought Back

As you can see, a lot of very white feeling cards on this list. You get to draw cards but you need to do white things to do so, be that attacking with several guys, as a tax on the opponent, making small guys, making tokens, getting plains from your deck, or playing stuff back out of the bin. Kayla's Music Box is probably the closest to an unconditional non-white draw effect and it is one of the cards that isn't actually drawing! It is also the weakest cards on this list. It is effectively a white card yet seems to perform less well than Mazemind Tome and Reckoner Bankbuster. A lot of these cards are also quite interesting and give options beyond those obtained through the card drawing side of things. 

Next up is akin to card advantage and that is card selection. White has always had a bit of this with cards like Academy Rector, Steelshaper's Gift, Enlightened Tutor, Stoneforge Mystic and that sort of thing. Typically narrow cards and few of them. White is certainly bottom of the pile, even now, when it comes to card quality, selection, and tutoring. It has at least had a selection of new and interesting tutor and dig effects. While a bunch are narrow they do go a really long way to unlocking the potential of some other cards and strategies within the colour. Card draw and card selection combine well together to add a lot more consistency to any high synergy or combo like game plan. 

Recruiter of the Guard

Ranger-Captain of Eos

Thalia's Lancers

Oswald Fiddlebender 

Ingenious Smith

Board the Weatherlight

Choices are what make a game and lack of them was one of my main irks with the colour. Card draw and card quality effects increase your options but so do option rich cards. While this is not the biggest or most powerful pile of cards it is a list added to not very much at all and so there is higher demand and higher return than you might expect. Timeless Dragon is a great example of this. It is so simple looking and yet plays so dynamically. I spend a lot of time thinking about how best to use my Dragon whenever I draw it and that is testament to good card design. March of Otherworldly Light is another recent trump card that is simple in effect and easy to understand and yet yields an absolute wealth of choices about how you use it. It is so hard to hit the mark with a removal spell as they need to be direct and powerful which limits the space and leaves little room for things to make them interesting! It may not look like loads but there are plenty of cards not on lists here or on other lists in this article and they represent a general trend in more option dense cards. They all kind of stack up as well so that in any given deck you have that many new cards which have that much of a higher average option density that the games are typically choices galore!  

March of Otherworldly Light 

Skyclave Aspirant 

Paladin Class

Charming Prince 

Timeless Dragon

Farewell

Light of Hope

Angelic Ascension 

Restoration of Eiganjo

MDFCs

As far as small lists go this one is the winner. It is a list of interactive and disruptive cards that are not removal spells. The fact that this list exists at all is fantastic. White non-removal disruption has typically been static prison style affairs such as Thalia, Guardian of Thraben, which are typically not all that fun to play. It just lowers choices and offers very little. These newer cards manage to feel white, disrupt in a novel way, and critically provide choices. 

Elite Spellbinder

Remand (Reprieve)

Ephemerate

Ephemerate is a bit odd on a list of disruptive cards as it is just a counterspell to removal on a dork and a fair long way from the best white has to offer in that department. What makes Ephemerate soo good is that it is somewhat modal being able to protect and able to efficiently generate value. White has always been the home of flicker effects but not until recently has it been able to back that up with enough good things to flicker. You always had to play white for the effects and another colour for the targets but now you can do it all in house, and you can do it very well indeed. Here are a list of those new juicy mono white things that flicker oh so well. 

Spirited Companion

Inspiring Overseer 

Ambitious Farmhand

Samwise the Stouthearted 

Loran of the Third Path

Skyclave Apparition 

Combat Thresher

A couple of honourable mentions before we get to wrapping this up. Just a couple of new and novel cards for white that add to the possibilities and interest in the colour. These are the kinds of cards I will return to time and again as I build and tinker. 

Together Forever

Skrelv's Hive

(Brought Back falls into this group as well rather)

Last but very much not least we have the group of new flash cards. Combined with Settle the Wreckage, Restoration Angel, Archangel Avacyn, and Secure the Wastes which are all more mid era pre-existing cube cards, we get quite an impressive count. This gives white an awful lot of stuff white can be doing an instant speed. Scary tempo and interactive stuff. I would say that the flash stuff is the scariest and most powerful. It makes white a colour you fear in the way you used to fear blue. Four or more mana used to make me wary of walking into Cryptic Command and Mystic Confluence. Now it is those four and five mana white cards I fear most. 

Cathar Commando 

Wandering Emperor

Force of Virtue 

Resolute Reinforcements

Solitude (this dumb card can fit in almost all the lists in this article...)

White has gained far more new cards than any other colour since the acceleration of power creep around MH1 and Eldraine. Other colours left aspects of their broken past behind, red gets little good face burn, green doesn't get one mana ramp like it used to (or only in MH sets), blue gets worse countermagic and card quality than before etc. I never thought there could be a better removal spell than Swords to Plowshares and now we are in a spot where white has several contenders! Every aspect of white is being improved on or added to with whole areas of the colour pie being unlocked to it now as well. To those pre-existing good removal and good dorks we will add better removal and better dorks. Then we will give you good flicker effects and good EtB effects to go with them. Add to this some new disruption and extra flash juice to keep the opponent scared and off balance. Finally we will sprinkle in some card quality and card advantage to keep it all running smoothly and firing on all cylinders into the late game. Yea, white is pretty terrifying in cube these days.