Leyline of Sanctity, the white one, prevent stuff from targeting you, which can mess with a red-burn pretty well. Celestial Purges would be great against the red Leyline, as well as red permanents in general. Silences work well, but you must play them before they do anything, not in response to them actually doing something (found out the hard way that it wasn't a "counter-spell"). A War Priest of Thune would also help out a good deal. Basically anything that can get rid of an opposing permanent, such as Oblivion Ring. Like I said though, against the burn decks it held it's own until the Leyline came out. Any hope of hitting 40 life with Felidar Sovereign is shot, but with how much life gain there is in the deck you can enough life to cause a red deck problems, particularly cause I've noticed they tend to be creature poor, while this deck has some really good small, cheap, and helpful creatures.
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Tourny format: 3 rounds of swiss with a top 8 elimination. The First round I don't really want to count. I got paired up with a kid who was new and didn't have a good deck, ended up going 2-0 with no real opposition. Had some mana issues in both games though, and it let me see how it handles running just 2-4 mana, surprisingly well. Second Round was a bit more of a challenge as I played against the guy who taught me years ago and who I can count the number of times I've beaten him on one hand. After tonight I can add another finger to that count though, went 2-1. He was running a nasty red burn/unearth deck which was constantly hitting me and my creatures. I won the first round, but my lifetotal was kept low enough to not hit 30, so I took out the Sovereigns and the Enchantment/Artifact destruction spells, as well as a Crystal Ball and maybe a few others, and threw in a couple Pacifisms, Silence, and other creature control spells, as well as a few Emerge Unscathed to protect the creatures he was targeting. Well, the second round he managed to beat me 0-1 being the final life totals. Third round though I managed to get the faster life spells and build up over 30 life and just dominate him. Third round me and the other guy were both undefeated, so we split to secure our spots in the top 8. Him and I still played though, and he had a white allied deck which did basically what my Sliver deck did to this deck....just swarmed and over-powered it. Between protection from my stuff, his gaining life, and vigilance, he beat me down. First Round of the Top 8 went against another red deck. First round went hard and long, but with the lifegain managed to pull out the win. Not much to tell, just a fight between him hitting me, and me gaining life back. Wish I could say that the next matches were as much fun.....but no. Second game he had the red leyline, Leyline of Punishment. If you don't know what this card is, it is the bane of this deck. You can't gain life and you can't prevent damage. Let me tell you turn for turn how this match turned out. He went first, he had the Leyline in his opening hand, he dropped it, I looked at it and read it, I thought for a second, I began to shuffle my hand into my deck to begin match 3. And Match 3 was going good for a while, but ended up falling apart once he got the leyline back out again. I tried to hang on for a few rounds, hopeful to get the Enchantment destruction, but alas, the deck couldn't operate against the Leyline. Overall I'm pleased with the deck, earned me a free booster pack. When I head back to school gonna take it with me and see how it does with the group I play with down there too.
Gonna try it tonight and see how it works against other Standard decks.
I like this deck. Simple as that. Been working on a White Lifegain deck for Standard, but after seeing this I decided to put it together and test it. Well, just tore apart what I had been working on, and need to make a trade or two to fill in some proxys I had to use (somehow I had 0 Ajani's Pridemates, but just about everything else), but going to see how it does this coming Friday at the card shop. If you want I can let ya know how it does, but I tested it against my decks and it did very well against all of them. Have a few cards I'm considering for the Side-Board, including a few Transcendent Masters and Oblivion Rings and Pacifisms. Just curious, as the original builder of it, what would you recommend?