High water cut of produced fluid is one of the most common problems in reservoir development. At present, injecting plugging agents and other profile control and water plugging technologies are the most widely used solutions. With the development of deep oil and gas resources, high-temperature and high-salinity (HTHS) reservoirs are becoming increasingly common. Conventional polymers are prone to hydrolysis and thermal degradation under HTHS conditions, making polymer flooding or polymer-based gels less effective. Phenol–aldehyde crosslinking agent gels can be applied to different reservoirs with a wide range of salinity, but there exist the disadvantage of high cost of gelants. The cost of water-soluble phenolic resin gels is low. Based on the research of former scientists, copolymers consisting of acrylamide (AM) and 2-Acrylamido-2-Methylpropanesulfonic acid (AMPS) and modified water-soluble phenolic resin were used to prepare gels in the paper. The experimental results show that the gelant with 1.0 wt% AM-AMPS copolymer (AMPS content is 47%), 1.0 wt% modified water-soluble phenolic resin and 0.4 wt% thiourea has gelation time of 7.5 h, storage modulus of 18 Pa and no syneresis after aging for 90 days at 105 °C in simulated Tahe water of 22 × 104mg/L salinity. By comprehensively comparing the effectiveness of the gels prepared by a kind of phenolic aldehyde composite crosslinking agent and modified water-soluble phenolic resin, it is found that the gel constructed by the modified water-soluble phenolic resin not only reduces costs, but also has shorter gelation time and higher gel strength. The oil displacement experiment with a visual glass plate model proves that the forming gel has good plugging ability and thus improves the sweep efficiency. The research expands the application range of water-soluble phenolic resin gels, which has an important implication for profile control and water plugging in the HTHS reservoirs.