Cycling won't have me gaining life, but I should be casting spells along the way and there are a few ways to gain life in today's list
Mono-Blue Commander decks are renowned for drawing lots of cards, protecting combos, milling libraries, cheating in Artifacts, and somehow still having the audacity to say they're just a casual mono-color deck
This shell is a good starting point but likely needs some refinement in order to have a better shot in a competitive environment
Any card with a different colored expansion symbol (such as the purple expansion symbols from the Time Spiral timeshifted sheet) is treated as a special rarity
There are a few cards hither and yon that allow some incidentally in blue (Turn into a Pumpkin), while red is all about cant gain life as the inverse
This in turn can provide useful information as to what is in their hand based on how they play around the card