In the twenty-minute break afforded by my old high school, starting a game of Magic involving more than two or three players was kind of pointless. It just took too long. Everybody would take two turns, then that awful bell would ring, and we'd all be forced to pack up our cards and saunter over towards math class or some such nonsense.

One on one, on the other hand, you'd probably be able to get two or three games in. Hence, my mad skillz were picked up in duel setting - just you and your opponent, duking it out as if your lives depended on it. And I learned a lot about the game, what worked, and what didn't. In fact, I was finally starting to get to a point where I felt I knew what I was doing.

Then, all of the sudden, I started playing at people's houses, and games could last until three in the morning. Henceforth, the battlefield of choice was multiplayer. To my rather intense horror, none of the old rules seemed to apply anymore. Of course, my brain being the fleshy gooey thing that it is, over the years, I've adapted. I am now, once again, Not All That Bad At This.

As I only exist to share my infinite wisdom with you, I have hence decided to devote this article to one of my more surprising conclusions as to the strategic type differences between duels and multiplayer. So hold on, fasten your seatbelt, and whatever you do - don't go out for that ham sandwich!

See, when novice players try and graduate from"n00b" to"miser," one of the first things they have to learn to do without is lifegain. It's one of the tearier goodbyes, and it's easy to see why cards like Alabaster Potion, Heroes Reunion, and their ilk appeal to newer players.

The reasoning is simple: You start the game at twenty life, you lose the game when you hit zero, and anything that keeps you from getting there has got to be a plus, right? What is the easiest way of keeping yourself in the"safe zone?" Why, how about a direct blow of life to the head?

Something like Stream of Life... can easily gain you ten or fifteen life if you play it at the right time! That increases your life total by fifty to seventy-five percent! Now your opponent will have to work at least that much harder to kill you! My word, how can that not be good?

Of course, the tragic fact of the matter is that in most cases, lifegain is not good. The reasons for that are two-fold, as most people will know. The first is that cards like, say, Dega Sanctuary, or Scent of Jasmine, don't in fact do anything to increase your board position. They're a temporary infusion of health, but they won't help your defend yourself any better or attack more efficiently.

That one mana you just spent to reveal your hand and gain six life in response to an attack from Imperial Hellkite, could also have been spent on a Swords to Plowshares to remove the offending creature from the game completely. In the long run, that's the sort of action that will to leave you significantly better off, not gaining six life.

The other"downside" to lifegain is that, well,"not losing" is a long way from actually winning. I don't care how much life you're gaining per turn by tapping and untapping Tower of Eons; if there's no way you can get past my Woodland Druid to reduce me from one to zero, you're still not exactly kicking my butt.

Whereas, of course, doing ten damage a turn to your opponent is a viable strategy to induce victory.

Now, none of this is probably news to you. Everybody knows that in Magic, lifegain's for"n00bs," or at the very best, gravy tacked on to an already impressive card - like Absorb, or Phantom Nishoba, or some such.

Alright, alright - there's one other case. When you've got some sort of aggressive way of utilizing all that life - with say, Hatred or Necropotence - then it's okay to dabble with things like Ivory Tower. But only then. Otherwise, Lifegain Sucks And You Better Believe It.

Now, that's all well and good, and perfectly true - if it's just you and a single nemesis. However, if it's you and many nemesi (heh), I'm going to beg to differ. It is, you see, my humble opinion, but also my prolonged experience, that lifegain is good in multiplayer, and I'm going to tell you why.

When I first realized I had something to say about lifegain in multiplayer, I decided I needed to see what other people had had to say about lifegain in multiplayer. One's got's to know where one's coming from, amIright? So StarCityGames.com has these mighty fine archives, and you'll find mighty fine writers spewing mighty fine thoughts on many mighty fine topics. I have engaged in just this sort of search, and I have confirmed that I am not the first one to notice lifegain's appropriateness on a multimage battleground.

Andrew Healey points it out in his"A Rant on Prevention in Multiplayer: Arguing For Lifegain, Part One," written way back in the prehistoric era of 2002. His primary argument is that lifegain buys you time, and that with so many more players eager to dismember you, a bigger buffer in your lifetotal can't hurt at all. He also points to The Ferrett's"Diabolic Cows: The Schematics of Multiplayer and Bovine Influence," who likewise sings lifegain's praises in four-plus player meetings. Although I barely dare to paraphrase the once-Esteemed Editor (who is, for the record, still esteemed, but now the Editor-In-Chief, meaning he rarely, if ever, edits...) his line of reasoning as is follows:

Now, this is of course, perfectly true. But I'm going to go out on a limb and say the reasons lifegain is so much better in multiplayer are more fundamental. Let's go back and look at the primary reasons lifegain is bad in duels again:

1) It doesn't improve board position.

2)"Not losing" is a far cry from actually winning.

Well, number one's still true, obviously. Casting and flashing back Ancestral Tribute eight times doesn't change a thing about what the table looks like, not even when it's a big table with many players around it.

The thing is though, that it strikes me that there's a second dimension to this clause in the situation we're considering. How about political position? In multiplayer, mages aren't just deciding how to attack; they also have to decide who to attack. That kind of decision is dependant on more than just what the board looks like.

Lifegain plays a vital part here. All other things being equal, players in my group will tend to go after whoever they think they can take out... yup, the player that's down in the single digits. And the big turn off? A massive lifetotal! Why go after the guy with sixty life, for crying out loud? Why not turn your attention to more vulnerable targets?

A consistent lifegainer? Someone who's gaining more life every turn, by virtue of some permanent or repetitive combo? That's enough to awaken the fatalist in anybody. The message here: Lifegain does do something tangible for you, in terms of"virtual board position"(heh again) in a multiplayer game: It demoralizes the opposition, and sends their armies elsewhere!

Now let's look at number two. Number two's the big one as far as I'm concerned. '"Not losing" is a far cry from actually winning.' As much as I agree with this when we're talking two player matches, think about it in terms of multiplayer. See, assuming you're in a five player game, until three others are dead, the best you can do is"not lose." It doesn't matter how strong your offense is, or how cunning your attack: Killing the first opponent doesn't win you the game. Killing your second opponent doesn't win you the game. Hell, even killing your third opponent doesn't win you the game. Not until you off that last one can you actually win.

As multiplayer games progress, player after player drops off, until there are just two survivors left... And until that point is reached, the best result you can possibly hope for... is to be one of those two! Now, you can further that agenda by making sure others drop off quickly, or just by making sure you're not one of the people to go.

That second option -"not losing" - might even be one of the better gameplans. Why? Because it doesn't involve antagonizing anybody, and it allows you to invest solely in your wellbeing rather than the destruction of others, which means you'll be much better set-up for the Final Two-Player Showdown. Essentially, a real defensive lifegain deck is just going to sit there and allow others to do the dirty work - that is, actually removing players - for it.

Of course, inherent in this plan is that not everybody's caught on to it. The Ambush Commander/Wellwisher/Untap Target Elf threesome vs. Repeatedly Resurrected Baloths Horror Show vs. the Necroprotence/Ivory Tower double-act vs. the Infinite Life Clerical Wiseguys just isn't going to be a game that's much fun to watch.

The clue here is that a lot of players haven't quite caught on yet to the powers of lifegain, and that others don't respect it enough or think it's"too wussy" to try it. The odds of being in a game where everybody's on the defensive just aren't that big. You're always going to have That One Big Tough Macho that's going to go around keeling people over with this His Super Aggressive Bad Boy Deck.

Of course, even if you are going to get yourself up to a zillion life, when it's just you and the last man standing, you better have some way of killing him, because, in the end... well, you've got to win somehow, eh?

Now this is not to say that lifegain's the answer to all your problems - I'm not that kind of oracle - but I do think it's important to realize that it's two biggest disadvantages in duels are much less important in multiplayer. Lifegain can have an important impact on where you stand in the game: it can turn other people away from you, to prey on the weak. After all,"not losing" is, for the longest part of the game, the highest attainable goal in a multimagal setting. So don't turn away from it immediately. It just might work for you.

Elske van der Vaart
elskevdv@ai.rug.nl