Much Abrew: Historic Soul Sisters
Hello, everyone! Welcome to another episode of Much Abrew About Nothing. Soul Sisters has been a fan-favorite lower-tier archetype in Modern for a long time, but now, thanks to a powerful new addition from Core Set 2021 and some Historic Anthologies cards, it might finally be time for the deck to make the leap to Magic Arena in the Historic format! The goal of today's deck—Historic Soul Sisters—is basically to port Modern Soul Sisters into the Historic format while also taking advantage of Speaker of the Heavens—one of the best new lifegain payoffs we've seen in a long time. How good can a deck built around gaining life be in Historic? How strong is Speaker of the Heavens? Let's get to the video and find out; then, we'll talk more about the deck!
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Much Abrew: Historic Soul Sisters
Discussion
- That went well! We played five matches with Historic Soul Sisters and won all five, which is impressive all by itself, even more so when you consider we played some of the best decks in the Historic format (like Simic Nexus, Esper Control, and Golos Field) and topped them all!
- The plan of Soul Sisters is pretty straightforward. Our deck is overflowing with cards that gain us life and payoffs that reward us for gaining life.
- As for lifegain, Soul Warden and Daxos, Blessed by the Sun are our Historic versions of the Soul Sisters (since Soul's Attendant isn't legal in the format yet), giving us incremental lifegain as we cast our creatures, while cards like Linden, the Steadfast Queen, Ajani, Strength of the Pride, and Heliod, Sun-Crowned can gain us huge chunks of life each turn.
- Meanwhile, our payoffs go in two directions. Ajani's Pridemate (along with Ajani's Pridemate tokens from Ajani, Strength of the Pride) and Heliod, Sun-Crowned reward us for gaining small bits of life repeatedly. Once we get Soul Warden and / or Daxos, Blessed by the Sun on the battlefield, every creature we resolve not only gains us a life but also grows our creatures with +1/+1 counters. If we can get two or more Soul Sisters on the battlefield, we can turn these payoffs into massive threats in short order.
- Our second group of payoffs don't really care about how we gain life. Instead, they want us to get to a certain life total, with Serra Ascendant turning into a one-mana 6/6 flying lifelinker once we get to 30 life and Speaker of the Heavens making 4/4 Angel tokens for free each turn once we get up to 27 life. If we can get all the way up to 35 life, we can even use Ajani, Strength of the Pride as a Plague Wind to clear away our opponent's board and get in for a massive, game-ending attack.
- While the strength of Serra Ascendant is pretty well known, heading into our matches, I wasn't 100% sure how good Speaker of the Heavens would be in practice. After playing the deck, I can say that Speaker of the Heavens is as good as I had hoped. We were able to turn it on consistently fairly early in the game, and apart from being solid creatures, the 4/4 flying Angels also offer another way to trigger our Soul Sisters to gain even more life and grow our other payoffs. The end result is that our deck has two one-mana creatures that can win the game by themselves in something like three turns, which puts a massive amount of pressure on our opponent's removal. Even if our opponent can deal with our first couple of lifegain payoffs, there's likely another one right around the corner thanks to the redundancy Speaker of the Heavens offers.
- Outside of our lifegain shenanigans, the most important card in our deck is Thalia, Guardian of Thraben. Apart from being a cheap white creature, Thalia, Guardian of Thraben doesn't have any specific synergy with our lifegain plan, but it is essential to staying alive long enough to execute our primary plan. Taxing non-creature spells doesn't hurt us much at all (our only non-creatures are Ajani, which is still powerful at five mana, and Conclave Tribunal, which we can convoke into play on the cheap even with Thalia, Guardian of Thraben on the battlefield). On the other hand, slowing down wraths and planeswalkers by a turn is huge, often buying us the one extra turn we need to close out the game with our lifegain army. Plus, Simic Nexus might be the best deck in Historic at the moment, and Thalia (combined with Dovin, Hand of Control from the sideboard for even more taxing) is the best option a mono-white deck has to slow down the spell-based infinite-turn combo.
- In general, I'm really happy with where the deck ended up. The only part that I might change would be the mana. I'm honestly not sure if Radiant Fountain is worthwhile or not. While it does help us get up to 27 or 30 life to turn on our payoffs, and it is a "free" way to trigger Ajani's Pridemate and Heliod, Sun-Crowned, being colorless is a big downside and occasionally forces us to play things off-curve (especially Linden, the Steadfast Queen, with its triple-white-mana cost). It might be worth going down to two or three copies.
- So, should you play Soul Sisters in Historic? I think the answer is clearly yes. Not only did we go 5-0 with the deck, but we also took down several of the top decks in the Historic format along the way. Soul Sisters, thanks in part to Speaker of the Heavens, feels like a legitimate competitive option for the format. If you like gaining life or just like winning games and ranking up, Soul Sisters feels like a super-solid and fun option for the Historic format!
Conclusion
Anyway, that's all for today. As always, leave your thoughts, ideas, opinions, and suggestions in the comments, and you can reach me on Twitter @SaffronOlive or at SaffronOlive@MTGGoldfish.com.
