This is basically an example deck of mono white EDH for a buddy of mine. He's just making his transition into the beautiful world of Elder Dragon 1980's Fantasy Film and he's said that mono white is what he feels he's interested in. So this is going to be a bit of a primer of sorts.
There are several ways to go about mono white EDH, the most popular strategies being prison and token generation. Now if you (Ken) or anyone else who happens to view this know the way I play and like to go about things then you should know that I prefer the "friendlier" or more casual routes to magic and deck building. So prison was out the window for me as I enjoy having friends and I enjoy playing enjoyable games. Token generation it is, so now comes to general selection. The choices being Darien, Kemba or Oyobi. After deciding the play style that suited me and examining the list of generals that would best service this play style I began the process of elimination. Kemba requires equipment to operate and I didn't want to turn this into a voltron deck that pretty much depended on my general so cat man was out. Oyobi puts out probably the highest quality of tokens available to me but his pre-requisites of spirit or arcane spells didn't really suit my interests so she's out. This leaves Darien, interesting ability, cool art, good creature type and fairly priced mana cost. Perfect.
Selecting the other 99
Everyone has their own deck building technique and they are especially varied when you have 99 card choices at your disposal but this; personally is what works for me. First I throw in the obvious format staples that would best support the colours/colour of my choices shortcomings. In white this is primarily card advantage and mana. So to remedy this I threw in the almost necessities for mono white. Mind's Eye, Planar Portal, Thran Dynamo, Solemn Simulacrum, Worn Powerstone, Endless Horizons, Staff of Nin (this is especially good because it also produces a token if we target our self) and the ultimate in mono white land grab; Weathered Wayfarer.
Next I move on to the cards that would be synergistic to my generals ability in this case with Darien both the method of activation and the output of the ability. I threw in as many lords to pump up the solider tokens as possible and as many cards as I could that gave my tokens cool abilities and a little more oomph. The stars of this selection being Catapult Master, Akroma's Memorial, Eldrazi Monument, Field Marshal, Captain of the Watch and Hero of Bladehold. So now we've established what were going to do when Darien's ability tiggers, next we search for ways that we can trigger it and get to the fun steps and big swings. For this I had some soopa secret tech in the form of Jade Monolith, this card is an absolute beast in Darien EDH. People don't even have to swing at you to proc Dariens ability so any attack anywhere at anytime that is blocked can lead to you getting tons of sweet soldier tokens. The Kresh player wants to swing at the poor guy who only has a birds of paradise for 12? Pay the 1, enjoy twelve complimentary tokens.
Now the only problem with this is the whole "damage causes the loss of life" rule. This can be an issue with Darien as you don't want to get too cocky with him and end up having someone swinging at you for game because you wanted to get a massive token army. To counteract this I thought the most sensible step was to add lifegain in the most accessible and synergistic form, lifegain that is directly related to your loss of life. Enter Soul Warden, Souls Attendant, Suture Priest and Auriok Champion. With any of these two out with Darien you can consistently take any amount of damage and net a good amount of life. Now all of this is absolutely fantastic but these situations I've described were in a vaccuum and to truly have a successful EDH deck and play experience your deck has to be able to operate god forbid your general gets Swords to Plowshared,O-ringed, hindered or any number of other crappy things. In order to still facilitate a win if Darien is out of the picture I included many other token producers to keep with soldier synergy (Decree of Justice, Martial Coup, Conqueror's Pledge, Nomads' Assembly and Alliance of Arms) as well as straight up beaters (Mirror Entity, Ajani's Pridemate, SIgnal Pest, Hero of Bladehold and Mikaeus, the Lunarch) and finally some recursion to keep things on track and moving in the form of Emeria, the Sky Ruin and Reya Dawnbringer.
So we have all of the essential pieces to a fun deck, plenty of utility, plenty of win conditions, tons of synergy and some nice simple combos. Only thing missing is the all important mana base. This mana base was the pretty standard 36 lands to begin with and then I cut some for some pain lands because that just seemed like too good of a chance to pass up and even without Darien the life loss won't matter much with all the life you'll be gaining. This concludes my hastily written Darien, the Emo King primer. Feel free to ask any questions or make any suggestions you feel would be necessary.