B/G/u Gifts Ungiven is the best deck in Kamigawa Block. What? You already knew this? I’m not going to write about why the Gifts deck is the best deck by far in this block format, as the results of every Grand Prix held in this format will tell you the same. What a lot of people don’t know is how to play the deck correctly. If you look at the PTQ results, you’ll see that there are a lot less Gifts control decks in the Top 8s than there are at Grand Prix, and we all know that the best players in the game don’t usually play PTQs.
Here’s the Dutch list that myself and three other Dutch players used for Grand Prix: Salt Lake City. The testing group was Rogier Maaten (Top 8), Jelger Wiegersma (T32), Frank Karsten (Top 8), myself (9th), and also a bit with Kenji Tsumura (Top 4):
Creatures (15)
- 4 Sakura-Tribe Elder
- 1 Ink-Eyes, Servant of Oni
- 1 Meloku the Clouded Mirror
- 2 Kokusho, the Evening Star
- 1 Myojin of Night's Reach
- 1 Hana Kami
- 1 Ghost-Lit Stalker
- 4 Kagemaro, First to Suffer
Lands (23)
Spells (22)
I’m not going to explain all of the cards, since most of them should be clear to you by now. I am going to discuss some choices that are very often different in other Gifts decks:
1 Ghost-Lit Stalker in the main deck: With the number of players choosing to play Gifts continuously increasing, this guy is a solid addition to the main deck. The game before sideboarding in the mirror is all about the Myojin, and Ghost-Lit Stalker serves as an additional Myojin a lot of the times for one less mana, making it easier to Gifts Ungiven for. Apart from its role in the mirror, it’s really good against Blue-based control decks because they can’t counter it (you almost never cast this guy or else you have to protect it from Sickening Shoal, Threads of Disloyalty, etc).
1 Exile into Darkness in the main deck: Most of the top Japanese players moved Exile to the sideboard because they didn’t expect too many White Weenie and Black Ogre/Demon decks to make it worth the slot. The scariest card next to Hokori and Jitte in the White Weenie matchup is Hand of Honor, since you can’t remove it with Sickening Shoal, and if it has equipment attached to it, it’s very often too hard to remove with a Kagemaro. Exile into Darkness provides a solid answer to the Hand.
A lot of players still choose one of these Beatdown decks though, and Exile is just insane against those decks. Besides, in a control matchup, if you draw it, you can sometimes remove it to fuel a Sickening Shoal, which happens a lot of times, so it’s definitely not a dead card in the mirror.
The Goryo’s Vengeance sideboard plan: The most important part of the sideboard is a good plan for the mirror. We tested many different options: Nezumi Graverobbers, Nezumi Shortfangs, Hondens, Godos, the Goryo’s plan, and more discard spells. We found that there were two good options: Godos or Goryo’s Vengeance. They are about as good, but we thought that people wouldn’t expect the Goryo’s plan, so we decided to run that. The basic idea is to get access to as many Kokushos as possible, making Goryo’s Vengeance very dangerous. An additional Ink-Eyes is also good with the Vengeance, as you can just deal five and get one of their guys back. We often wanted to get a Time of Need with Gifts in testing, so we added one of those as well (it acts as a 5th Kokusho or 3rd Ink-Eyes, but with a different name).
3 Pithing Needle in the sideboard: Now that Mono-Blue is a popular deck, Pithing Needle has become a great sideboard option. It stops everything that you’re afraid of in the matchup: Jushi, Meloku, and more importantly Azami, and all of this for the low cost of one mana, making it very hard to counter.
1 Cranial Extraction in the sideboard: You don’t want this for the mirror, as it is too tempo-related, but you need it against White decks to permanently get rid of Hokori.
Some Matchup Analysis:
(these paragraphs are based on extensive testing)
The Gifts Mirror
I consider this to be the most important matchup in the format, because it is the most skill-intensive matchup, and you’re probably going to face the mirror more than you’re going to face other decks. Game one is mainly about the Myojin of Night’s Reach. In the early turns, you have to make sure that you have at least some mana acceleration, because you’re racing to cast an eight-mana spell. Getting more mana is still good in the late game; whoever has more mana can usually do more. The Gifts-mirror is all about what I like to call “the essentials”, the cards that are essential in any matchup, but especially the mirror: Sakura Tribe-Elder, Kodama’s Reach, Sensei’s Divining Top, Gifts Ungiven. I auto-mulligan any hand that has none of these cards, and a lot of the time also any hand that has only one of these cards, unless it’s a pretty good hand anyway.
With this sideboarding plan, the changes I make are as follows:
+1 Hero’s Demise
+1 Hisoka’s Defiance
+1 Time of Need
+1 Ink-Eyes, Servant of Oni
+2 Goryo’s Vengeance
+2 Kokusho, the Evening Star
-1 Ghost-Lit Stalker
-3 Kagemaro, First to Suffer
-1 Hideous Laughter
-1 Exile into Darkness
-1 Wear Away
-1 Sickening Shoal
Sickening Shoals are still very good after sideboard, and I decided to leave 1 Kagemaro in to Gifts Ungiven for; it’s a very good solution to Meloku the Clouded Mirror. Ghost-Lit Stalker isn’t very good after sideboarding because of how fast the matchup is, but Myojin is kept in as it sometimes is a good target for Time of Need or Gifts; it takes out their entire hand and gives you a 5/2, as opposed to Ghost-Lit Stalker which only sometimes takes out their entire hand.
After sideboarding, you should be looking for a Kokusho as early as possible; this puts a lot of pressure on your opponent, giving you some time to get the rest of your game together. After the first big guy, you should try to get some more mana and play Gifts Ungiven. You can now either go for the Myojin-plan, or get more Kokushos, Ink-Eyes and Goryo’s Vengeance. Don’t give up if you have an empty board and your opponent just wrecked your hand with a Myojin – with so many Goryo’s Vengeance in the deck you can easily topdeck your way out of it.
If you resolve a Myojin against another Gifts deck, it’s usually correct to activate it immediately instead of in their draw step, because if you pass the turn and they have a removal for your Myojin and a spell that draws them cards, there’s a trick they can do to keep some cards. For example, if they have Sickening Shoal and Gifts Ungiven, they can play Gifts and in response Sickening Shoal the Myojin. This way, the Myojin would be gone when the Gifts is still on the stack.
Mono-Blue:
Mono-Blue in Block isn’t like the Type Two variant – it doesn’t have Vedalken Shackles or any other way to permanently remove cards that are in play. That’s why you should be looking to resolve a relevant permanent, but you shouldn’t be in a rush. You can use your instant spells to force your opponent to tap mana in his turn, so he might have a hard time finding a counterspell for the spell you’re playing in your main phase. Ink-Eyes is very good because the Ninjitsu-ability can’t be countered by a normal counterspell, and Soulless Revival can provide a lot of card advantage, because you can splice it onto spells that otherwise weren’t going to be countered. Ghost-Lit Stalker is great to channel; don’t ever cast him, the Blue decks run Threads of Disloyalty.
The cards that you’re afraid of are basically every creature he has: Jushi Apprentice, Meloku and Azami. As long as you can deal with these three, he has no way of getting card advantage or killing you. Don’t be too quick to sacrifice your Tribe Elders, since they sometimes have trouble dealing with them and the games take pretty long, so they often deal more than 5 points of damage, and maybe Ninjitsu out an Ink-Eyes.
Sideboarding goes as follows:
+1 Time of Need
+1 Rending Vines
+1 Hero’s Demise
+1 Ink-Eyes, Servant of Oni
+3 Pithing Needle
+1 Cranial Extraction
-1 Hideous Laughter
-1 Exile into Darkness
-2 Kokusho, the Evening Star
-1 Myojin of Night’s Reach
-1 Wear Away
-2 Sensei’s Divining Top
For games two and three, you have a second and third Ink-Eyes (Time of Need is number three; Ink-Eyes is the best card in the matchup because they can’t really counter it), and three Pithing Needles. The Needles are great; they deal with most of the cards that you’re afraid of for only one mana.
They have Pithing Needle as well, that’s why I take out two Divining Tops, since you don’t want to draw two of them early on if they have a Needle.
White Weenie:
The little White men are your best matchup; you have all the answers to their spells. The three things you are most afraid of are Hokori, Jitte, and Hand of Honor with equipment attached to it. In the first game, you try to get two, preferably three Black mana, and play Kagemaro. This is the best card you have against the deck, because it’s instant removal for their entire board. Be mindful of Otherworldly Journey though, the best way to play around it is to sacrifice Kagemaro in your own end step. If they have Otherworldly Journey then, their creature comes back at the end of their turn. If you let them untap, they might have mana for Charge Across the Araba, or maybe even Indomitable Will or Plow Through Reito. Sometimes you have to wait with your Kagemaro activation though, as Hokori isn’t a very uncommon card for the maindeck nowadays.
Sideboarding:
+2 Hideous Laughter
+1 Rending Vines
+1 Pithing Needle
+1 Cranial Extraction
+1 Hero’s Demise
-1 Ghost-Lit Stalker
-1 Myojin of Night’s Reach
-2 Kokusho, the Evening Star
-1 Ink-Eyes, Servant of Oni
-1 Sensei’s Divining Top
You have a lot more creature removal now, and they have Hokori now for sure. A lot of creatures are sideboarded out, but Kagemaro or Meloku are enough to finish the games off with. The worst thing that can happen now is that you expose yourself to Hokori without a removal spell for it; you should always try to play around this, even if it means going to a very low life total; White Weenie doesn’t have anything to deal damage with apart from creatures, as they will probably board out their Shining Shoals. The single Extraction might seem a bit odd, but if you cast this on Hokori, you don’t have to worry about tapping out again. I also take out one Top, as they sometimes have Needles as well. This is your best matchup, so mulligan aggressively. The matchup is about 70-30 in your favor.
Mono-Black Beatdown (Ogre/Demon):
A Sink into Takenuma at the right time can completely destroy you, but if they don’t have any creatures in play at that point, it can destroy them as well. Sink is the card that you’re most afraid of, and sometimes Nezumi Graverobber can be very bad for you as well, so don’t rely on your graveyard recursion too much.
Sideboarding:
+1 Pithing Needle
+1 Hero’s Demise
+1 Rending Vines
-1 Ghost-Lit Stalker
-1 Ink-Eyes, Servant of Oni
-1 Myojin of Night’s Reach
Again you’re boarding in removal and boarding out some creatures. One Hideous Laughter is the right number, because they don’t have too many creatures that the Laughter destroys, but it’s a good Gifts target sometimes. This matchup is also good, but not quite as good as White Weenie, because Black has bigger creatures. It’s about 60-40 in your favor.
Sensei’s Divining Top
I’d like to pay some special attention to one of the deck’s essential pieces: the Top. I’ve seen it misused a lot of times because it can be a tricky card to play, if you haven’t thought about it in advance. By this I don’t mean how to stack the top three cards, but when to spin the Top and when to shuffle it back into the deck.
You should always keep in mind that Sensei’s Top gives you an opportunity to get the best card out of your top three – nothing more, nothing less.
Situation #1: An opening hand with Top, Sakura-Tribe Elder and enough lands. You play your Top on turn 1, but what’s going to be your next play? To analyze this play, I’ll show you the end result of the two possible plays:
Play #1: You Top during the upkeep, then Top again after you draw a card, and then play your Tribe Elder. You can now either choose to sacrifice the Elder, or you can choose not to.
End result: You looked at a total of 4 cards and selected two. You have Tribe Elder in play on turn 3, and you can now use Top again (giving you a total of 3 cards selected out of 5), or shuffle your deck. If your opponent has a creature, the Tribe Elder can gain you some life.
Play #2: You don’t activate the Top, and play your Tribe Elder on turn 2. You sacrifice the Tribe Elder to jump to four mana.
End result: You have 4 mana on turn 3. If you opponent had a creature, the Tribe Elder gained you some life.
The reason why it’s wrong to not sacrifice your Tribe Elder in play #2 is clear if you look at the end result of play #2 if you don’t sacrifice it. You then have three mana on turn 3, and you can use the Divining Top once to get one out of three cards. You do have two mana open on turn 3, but this only matters if you have another Tribe Elder, or more Divining Tops. Play #1 gives you more card selection.
Comparing the results of both plays shows that play #1 allows you to select more cards, and play #2 accelerates your mana earlier, and gets you a good blocker against Umezawa’s Jitte on turn 2. I usually prefer play #1, as the acceleration often becomes relevant only after the first few turns. But if you want to play Gifts Ungiven on turn 3, or Kodama’s Reach to jump to six mana for turn 4 (you also get a Top activation here if you sacrifice the Tribe Elder on turn 2), play #2 can be used. Also, if your opponent is playing first, and has a creature that Tribe Elder can block, and then an Umezawa’s Jitte, you may want to use play #2 to prevent the Jitte to get any counters too soon.
A lot of situations are similar to this one, this situation is the most common example, and if you’re not sure on what’s the correct play, think the play out. There are usually two possible plays, one resulting in more draw manipulation and less mana available each turn than the other.
Situation #2: You need the card that’s on top, but you need to shuffle
You’ve decided that you want to change your Divining Top for the top card of your library, and you’re shuffling at instant speed. If you have one mana available, here’s how you should use your Top one last time before cashing it out:
- Play this ability first: Look at the Top three cards
- In response: Use your shuffle effect (usually Sakura-Tribe Elder or Gifts Ungiven)
- In response: Draw your card
End result: You draw the card you wanted, and get to stack the top three cards of your deck in the right order after you’ve shuffled the Divining Top back into the deck.
Situation #3: There’s a Gifts Ungiven on top and you need to play it now
This situation usually only occurs against beatdown decks, since you want to keep your Divining Top against other control decks. This play is slightly different from the play in situation #2:
- Look at the top three cards
- In response: Draw a card (the card you draw is Gifts Ungiven).
- After you let the draw-a-card ability resolve, play Gifts Ungiven.
End result: You’ve shuffled away your Top, but you’ve played Gifts Ungiven and you get to stack the top three cards of your deck accordingly after you’ve shuffled your deck with Gifts Ungiven.
Mulligans
When you’re playing Gifts, you must not be afraid to mulligan aggressively. If you look at the quarterfinals of GP: Salt Lake City, you’ll see that in the match of Kenji Tsumura vs. Rogier Maaten, game 2 went to Kenji after taking three mulligans. Gifts is a very powerful deck, but there are a lot of one-ofs in the deck that you don’t want to draw in most situations. Cards like Hana Kami, Soulless Revival, Exile into Darkness, Death Denied, and the many other one-ofs, these are the cards you sometimes get with Gifts Ungiven, but you don’t want them in your opening hand because you don’t know if they’re going to be good or not.
All of the cards that you run four of in the deck are good cards to have in your opening hand. The emphasis lies on Kodama’s Reach, Sensei’s Divining Top and Sakura-Tribe Elder, because without these three, it’s very hard to draw your mana properly, or cast your more expensive spells in time. Almost any hand without at least one of these three is a mulligan. The only hands without these three that I would keep are hands with Gifts Ungiven, at least three lands (one of which provides Blue mana), and some other good spells such as Kagemaro or Sickening Shoal.
Off course, your mulligan decision relies a lot on the deck you’re up against. The value of certain cards changes in different matchups (Example: Hideous Laughter is good against White Weenie but not against other Gifts decks), and you generally mulligan less or more in different matchups. Against mono-Blue, you should mulligan less aggressively, because the games will probably take long, and you have a lot of time to set things up. Against a fast deck, you have to try to outlive the early game, and to do that you need a good opening hand, so you should mulligan more aggressively. This is not only so for beatdown matchups, but also for the mirror match. Very often games in the mirror don’t take very long in turns (usually about up to turn 8-10), they just seem to because the turns take a long time.
All things considered, Gifts is a very hard deck to play perfectly, not only because of its usual control factor, but also because most games are very different. The more one-ofs you play, the more options you have every time you draw Gifts and the more different ways there are to play a game. Even when I test with Gifts, after playing more than 200 games with it, I still find new types of games sometimes. The most important thing is that you should play with the deck as often as possible; to explore all of the options the deck gives you. Also try to discuss certain opening hands if you think it’s a difficult decision whether to mulligan or not, post them in the forums, for example.
Until next time,
Julien