White is the color in the Magic: The Gathering color pie best known for weenie (small) creatures, taxing abilities, and equipment synergies. Additionally, white has been recognized more recently as the color filled with some of the best enchantment cards in the game.
The two mana value slot is arguably the most important in the entirety of the game, no matter what format you're playing, as failing to play a card on turn two immediately puts you on the backfoot against your opponent. It's also easier to string together multiple spells the more two drops you have in your deck. All that being said, let's take a look at the best two-mana white cards Magic has to offer.
10 Drannith Magistrate
This cheap creature flew under the radar for a long time before becoming an important piece of sideboard tech in white decks across the Modern format. This creature single-handedly prevents common combo decks like Living End and Indomitable Creativity from going off, as both strategies rely on casting cards from outside your hand.
While the Magistrate is easy enough to remove thanks to his low toughness, combo decks often don't have many deck slots to work with bringing in removal. Consequently, this little creature can turn a surefire win from one of these combo decks into a definite loss. It's hard to do better than that for two mana, eh?
9 Rest In Peace
Speaking of sideboards, Rest in Peace is a sideboard staple in Modern from many years past. Over the course of the format's history, there have always been decks that seek to use their graveyard to leverage an advantage. Just as well, these decks are many times among the most popular in the format.
For whatever reason, Magic players seem to just love playing with graveyard synergies. The benefit of Rest in Peace is that it not only deals with the graveyard when it enters the battlefield but continues to prevent an opponent from piling up cards there. Consequently, any graveyard player will need to remove the enchantment from the battlefield if they wish to enable their graveyard shenanigans once more.
8 Containment Priest
Somewhat similar to Drannith Magistrate, Containment Priest is another tool for preventing opponents from cheating creatures into play without paying the proper costs. Unlike Drannith Magistrate, Containment Priest's access to flash allows you to play it in response to an opponent trying to cheat a creature into play.
In other words, Magistrate is proactive, while Priest is reactive. Containment Priest sees play in the mainboard and sideboard of white decks in Magic's oldest formats, Legacy and Vintage, as some of the best strategies involve reanimating creatures from the graveyard.
7 Puresteel Paladin
This is a key creature in Hammer Time strategies present in Modern. The deck's namesake card, Colossus Hammer, takes full advantage of the discounts Puresteel Paladin offers, allowing you to turn this creature into a game-ending threat for no mana at all.
Additionally, the ability to draw a card every time an equipment enters the battlefield can make a huge difference in games where your opponent has answers to your strategy. Long story short, there's a good reason that Hammer Time uses the full playset of Paladins. Other equipment-based decks ought to play as many of this creature as they can.
6 Giada, Font Of Hope
Speaking of synergies, Giada is a fairly new creature released with Streets of New Capenna that has largely enabled Angel strategies in formats including Standard and Explorer. A flying, vigilance 2/2 is already a great deal for two mana value.
The fact that Giada also provides additional +1/+1 counters to Angels you cast and can ramp you into casting further Angels makes this card over-the-top good. Before Giada, Angels was a pet deck that players wished could put up a real fight. After Giada, it's a real metagame strategy that competes with the best.
5 Blind Obedience
This is a Commander favorite, and a powerful one at that. Blind Obedience reduces the effectiveness of opposing artifacts and creatures greatly by forcing them to enter the battlefield tapped. This prevents opponents from accessing mana from artifacts by a turn and also makes their defenses less effective, thanks to making creatures enter the battlefield tapped.
As if all of that wasn't good enough, Blind Obedience also allows you to drain each opponent for one life and gain one life each time you cast a spell for the cost of a single white or black mana. This life drain can be used in tandem with other life gain matters cards to make this effect much more potent than it would be otherwise, and it's already quite good.
4 Thalia's Lieutenant
Humans are one of the most popular white creature types, if not the flagship white creature type. Thalia's Lieutenant is one of the most powerful Humans ever printed, providing counters to all other Humans you control when it enters the battlefield. It also gains counters itself whenever you play another Human.
Thalia's enter the battlefield trigger can be used in tandem with flicker effects to provide your side of the battlefield with repeated +1/+1 counter boosts. While you might think that being forced to play only Humans would be a significant downside, it turns out there are so many cheap, powerful Humans in the game that Humans was a tier-one Modern deck for a couple of years prior to Modern Horizons.
3 Stoneforge Mystic
This creature has one of the most dramatic histories in all of Magic and was banned in Modern for nearly a decade before eventually being unbanned in 2019. Stoneforge Mystic was once a key component of the notoriously broken Caw-Blade Standard deck developed by famed player-gone-Hearthstone-pro Brian Kibler.
Nowadays, Stoneforge Mystic sees play in Modern as an important player in Hammer Time decks. Mystic's synergy with equipment cards is hard to overstate, allowing you to tutor your deck for whatever equipment you desire while also cheating those cards' mana values thanks to its activated ability.
2 Thalia, Guardian Of Thraben
Arguably one of the most reprinted creatures in all of Magic, Thalia has become the flagship creature of white decks. The Guardian of Thraben represents both the white weenie and taxation sides of the white color pie while being a Human to boot.
All things considered, there's no creature in Magic that better signifies what white does than Thalia. Taxing opponents for a single mana is a lot more backbreaking than most players realize at first glance, and Thalia is sure to do as much at least once as opponents are often forced to point a noncreature spell at her to remove her from the battlefield.
1 Balance
Here's a card so broken that it has been banned in Modern, Legacy, and Commander, as well as restricted in Vintage. Balance makes it laughably easy to come back from what should be an otherwise unwinnable position, allowing you to reset a game state no matter how far behind you are.
Additionally, you could float mana from your mana base before casting Balance and then spend that mana on other spells to put yourself far ahead of opponents while simultaneously decimating their hands, board states, and lands. For a card called Balance, the effects this spell produces are anything but.