Opening Up Gifts

Last Friday, I finally got to play with four copies of Gifts Ungiven in Vintage again. While I’d love to report that I clearly broke the format with it on
the first try by just recreating the old list, I actually did quite badly, going 1-3. However, I think that wasn’t a function of the deck being just bad,
but more one of me not being used to the deck’s inner workings anymore, leading to poor sideboarding decisions and a terribly built sideboard as well as a
loss against Workshops in a game I’m reasonably sure I should have won with correct decision-making.

What I want to do today is talk about the list I played, what I learned on Friday evening, and discuss how I’d revise it for the future with that
knowledge. After that, I’d like to discuss a couple of different ways Gifts could be abusable in the modern era, because just updating what we did nearly
ten years ago might not be the actual way to get maximum advantage out of Gifts Ungiven in spite of how absurd the deck was back in the day.

Decklist Time

I played something quite close to the list I proposed in my unbanning article:

Gifts Ungiven

Carsten Kotter

Test deck on 02-17-2015

Vintage

Creatures (1)

1 Blightsteel Colossus

Lands (16)

Spells (44)

Sideboard

In spite of my underwhelming result, I was actually quite happy with my maindeck. I only lost game one to Workshops and the sixty-card mirror and from how
the game went, I’m pretty sure I threw the Workshop game even though I’m not exactly sure at what point (I got to the point of casting Gifts but couldn’t
actually get there anyway – from experience, that has to mean I played that game quite badly).

The only things I wasn’t happy with actually were the Mental Missteps (which felt quite underpowered) and possibly the Dig Through Time (needs more
testing). Mana Drain, on the other hand, the card I was concerned might be a little too expensive for modern Vintage, felt extremely solid, and I’m likely
trying to get the fourth copy in next time I play.

The sideboarded games were where the problems were. In all the (non-shop) games I lost, I died with at least one of my boarded in cards available or in
hand and would have won had they been what I boarded out. A clear sign my sideboarding needs a lot of work, overboarding and all that jazz. That
being said, I’m also not very happy with a lot of the choices I made constructing the sideboard, not just with what I brought in. The weird split of
artifact removal spells looks cute, but the Gifts synergy there isn’t worth the loss of not just having more Ingot Chewers, there’s nothing actually useful
– as in more tempo-efficient disruption – to bring in against other blue decks (I’d like at least a Flusterstorm and a Pyroblast or something along those
lines in the future), and I think having three different pieces of hate for the Mono-Blue Belcher deck is likely overkill (expected a couple of those, but
as far as I know there was only one).

Now, sideboarding being by far the weakest part of my Vintage game right now isn’t particularly surprising – it’s where opposing decks’ capabilities are
most important, after all, and I’ve a lot of catching up to do given how long I’ve been effectively out of the format at this point.

As to what I liked, I never got to use the Containment Priest splash, but I still feel like that’s likely the best way to combine Dredge and Oath hate in
this deck (seeing how damaging Grafdigger’s Cage is against Gifts itself), and the Cage should probably just have been a third copy. Engineered Explosives
was excellent and could have gotten me back into the third game against Shops where no other card could have (had two mana, he had two spheres) if not for
a timely Phyrexian Revoker. The Null Rod did what it was supposed to do and gave me a straight turn 2 kill against the Belcher deck, so if you want hate
for that archetype, I warmly recommend it.

Lessons Learned

I won’t bore you with a tournament report for a four round event that I 1-3ed, but there are a couple of new things I learned about modern Vintage that I’d
like to share. Let’s start by general impressions of the format and some cards I hadn’t seen in action yet and follow it up with what I learned about my
own deck.

Mystic Remora is a Beating if you Play Cheap Threats

One of my opponents played a U/W deck with Monastery Mentors and Mystic Remora. Now, when I stopped having access to regular Vintage events, nobody
actually touched Mystic Remora so this was my first exposure to it, and man is it good at being a much improved Standstill. If you don’t have anything
going, it allows you to largely freeze the game, and if you have a solid threat in play – say Monastery Mentor and a token or two – choices for your
opponent rapidly become die if you do, die if you don’t. I never managed to stick my own, but I’ve gained a lot more respect for the card (I mainly played
my SB copy with the idea that it essentially should just win the game against the Belcher deck turn 1 on the play).

Whoever Thinks Jace, the Mind Sculptor is Even Close to Gifts Ungiven in Power Level is Kidding Themselves

I’ve played both Jace and Gifts in modern Vintage, and I’ve had both spells cast against me. Jace is a joke compared to Gifts Ungiven. On Friday alone, I
beat a Jace that sat in play for more than five turns and would have beaten another had I ever managed to find a way to deal with a Grafdigger’s Cage I
randomly decided not to counter when I could (my hand at that point was three Force of Will, Tinker, and Yawgmoth’s Will with a massively stocked yard).
Gifts simply allowed me to win the card advantage and control war easily in spite of Jace.

Jace takes three or four turns of activating to give you even close to the same level of quality advantage a resolved Gifts provides you with, has to come
down at sorcery speed, and doesn’t include the option of just trying for a game-winning push at the same time as being a broken card advantage tool. If
you’re among those that think Jace existing has made Gifts obsolete, you couldn’t be more wrong.

Workshops is a Very Different Deck From When I Last Played a lot of Vintage in Spite of Looking Similar

Shops has gotten a heck of a lot better in the time I wasn’t playing. In particular, it closes a lot faster and has enough spheres to fully lock you out
even in the long run between Lodestone Golem and Phyrexian Metamorph. That means the whole “deploy basics and find an opening to Hurkyl’s them for the win”
as your sole plan has lost a lot of luster because in many games, you simply won’t get to that point. It’s still fine as a way to create an opening to end
the game, but you need efficient, cheap removal first to even get to that point – and you really want that removal to be Ingot Chewer or Engineered
Explosives so that you can cast it through some Spheres at least.

Monastery Mentor is a Ridiculous Clock

I didn’t run any Mentors, but from seeing it in action against me and against other players, Mentor is the real deal as a white-based win condition. Unless
you’re completely flooding out after casting it, it generally ends the game in at most three attacks (usually two, sometimes even just a single one) and
does so while being hugely resilient to most forms of removal because so much of its power is stored in the random token bodies. That being said, it’s
still definitely raceable for something like Gifts if deployed aggressively unless Time Walk or some ridiculous spell chain becomes involved.

Gifts Really Wants a Cheap, Flexible Answer for Post-board Games Against Other Blue Decks

The Gifts list as I’ve built it has very few cards that can deal with resolved permanents you want anywhere near you deck against opposing blue decks.
However, Grafidgger’s Cage shuts down both Will and Tinker, meaning you’re actually very much in the market for an answer to such postboard. To me that
means I should probably try to incorporate a couple of copies of Repeal into the deck between maindeck and sideboard. Yes, Repeal is a weird card to board,
but it’s a perfect way to deal with Cage and similar cards because you can easily cycle it if they don’t have the hate piece, and it’s there as an answer
if they do.

You Want a Couple More Cheap Efficient Pieces of On-stack Interaction for Postboard Games

I mentioned this above, but when your opponents have Flusterstorm and Pyroblast postboard, it’s easy to fall behind on tempo if you don’t have something
similar. I’ll be trying to make room for one to three single mana interactive spells in the board in the future.

Workshops Needs a Very Dedicated Plan to Reign in

I mentioned the power of the (for me) new Workshop archetype above, and it definitely needs different tools to be dealt with than the few cards we used
back on ’05. There are two main approaches I’m considering. The first involves just a bunch of Ingot Chewers and Engineered Explosives as tools to create
an opening to Hurkyl’s Recall them and win at some point.

The second is a little more ambitious and extreme but feels like it could be the most effective by far. With Dredge seeing almost no play in my experience
– nobody is bringing it on Fridays and both Prague Eternal Events had only two or three Dredge players at the most – I’m quite interested in cutting most
of my graveyard hate for “Bazaar hate” that also happens to do a number on Workshops: Strip Mine and Wasteland. By boarding those instead of a mass of
removal – I’d still complement them with a couple of Chewers, Explosives, and a second Hurkyls though – you raise your own mana count while allowing you to
regularly lock the Workshop deck under their own Spheres for long enough to build up your own manabase towards Hurkyls and win territory.

With these ideas in mind, this is what I’ll likely test next time:

Gifts Ungiven

Carsten Kotter

Test deck on 02-17-2015

Vintage

Creatures (1)

1 Blightsteel Colossus

Lands (16)

Spells (44)

Sideboard

I’m a little sad to get rid of the Dig Through Time, but it was one of the clunkier maindeck cards and room has to come from somewhere. No Missteps is the
result of how mediocre they felt during the event, their slots being taken over by the fourth Mana Drain and the second Repeal. Maybe I’ll realize they
just felt that way but actually were very important once I don’t have them anymore, but until that happens, I’d like to see what the deck does when most of
the weak-feeling cards you can’t cycle are out of the list.

Experiment Time

There are three other approaches that I’m interested in trying with Gifts Ungiven at the moment, all three inspired by different assumptions about what
Gifts can do. The first one isn’t actually my work but something brought by two local Vintage aficionados, Titus Chalk (of “So Do You Wear A Cape?” fame)
and Michael Heiduk. Both decided to combine Gush and Gifts Ungiven, the two most ridiculous draw engines we’ve seen in the post-four Necropotence era. The
sweet tool the two players remembered I never thought about because it happened during my years of Vintage abstinence?

Lotus Cobra seems absolutely ridiculous in a Gush plus Gifts shell. The one thing that limits how broken Gifts Ungiven can be is mana. There’s basically no
deck that can keep up with you once you have access to enough mana, and Lotus Cobra means you have a lot of mana really fast (not to mention what happens
when you get GushBond online). I don’t have either player’s actual list yet, but this is what I’d consider trying myself just running with the idea:

Gush Gifts

Carsten Kotter

Test deck on 02-17-2015

Vintage

Creatures (6)

Lands (15)

Spells (39)

Splashing white for Mentor might be overkill – Tinker + Colossus would be on-color – but I like the synergy it has with the Gush engine, and it should be
very good with Gifts’ ability to constantly keep you fueled on powerful spells too. Having a win condition that isn’t affected by Grafdigger’s Cage might
be value enough, and the ridiculous things you can do with Lotus Cobra out should be enough to fuel Mentor nicely. I also like how much more busted your
Gifts piles become when you have Fastbond and Gush in your deck.

The second thing I’d like to investigate is a Control Slaver variant. While Gifts.dec was the most powerful way to abuse Gifts Ungiven in the past – at
least in my opinion – Goblin Welder plus Gifts is actually an awesome combo and one that saw play during the original Gifts era. Welder plus Black Lotus is
another way to get to the ridiculous mana counts you want to reach to maximize Gifts, double Entombing Mindslaver and Myr Battlesphere should often be a
straight up win, and we even have a purely artifact-based, hardcastable two-card combo to abuse with the deck now in Time Vault plus Voltaic Key. All of
this shouts potential, and Goblin Welder even happens to be an awesome maindeck card against Workshops. Here’s where I’d start looking:

Gifts Slaver

Carsten Kotter

Test deck on 02-17-2015

Vintage

Creatures (3)

Planeswalkers (1)

1 Tezzeret the Seeker

Lands (15)

Spells (41)

This list sacrifices a lot of the instant win potential of a traditional Gifts list by getting rid of Tendrils of Agony and Blightsteel Colossus and fully
relies on Vault + Key for that functionality. While that’s a sacrifice, it means you still have the ability to win on the spot while playing a powerful
card-advantage grind game aided by the awesomeness that is Goblin Welder. I’m no Slaver expert, but I like the basic looks of it, especially because just
having Welders should help significantly with the Shops matchup once you have boarded in a ton of removal.

The final thing I want to try out is playing Gifts as a totally fair (well, for Vintage) value tool. I lost the first game of round one (in the sixty-card
mirror) by my opponent casting Gifts for broken card, broken card, Mana Drain, Force of Will a bunch of times, and that’s a pretty sweet softlock to
explore. You can’t really give them the broken cards, but all that countermagic means you also don’t get to do stuff so pulling ahead against it becomes
essentially impossible. This is what I’m considering right now:

Gifts Ungiven

Carsten Kotter

Test deck on 02-17-2015

Vintage

Creatures (5)

Planeswalkers (2)

2 Jace, the Mind Sculptor

Lands (16)

Spells (37)

I have no idea if the list is even close to good in this form – the last time I’ve actually built and played a dedicated fair control deck in Vintage was
before Gifts was legal as a four-of the first time around – but I like the potential a list like this holds. Having a ton of answers and Snapcaster Mages
should allow you to grind very efficiently to set things up in such a way that you can easily abuse Gifts Ungiven as just a broken draw engine, and at some
point, you should be able to Gifts with a Snapcaster Mage or the Yawgmoth’s Will already in hand to take complete control of the game and lock up the W.

This might also be the list that wants to try out Soulfire Grand Master as a way to add a game-winning combo without giving up more than a single slot
(heck, maybe that’s what we should be building around). The easy access to white mana also means you get a truly ridiculous sideboard. Serenity, Rest in
Peace, and Containment Priest is a pretty rough line up to ignore for the linear decks I think.

All Opened

So while I wasn’t happy to completely scrub out in the first event I got to play with Gifts Ungiven times four in my deck after years of waiting, I’m still
not too disappointed. Gifts Ungiven proved to be as awesome as I remembered, and better play might easily have ended up with me going 4-0 instead. Even if
further testing reveals that the straight old list port of Gifts.dec isn’t good enough for modern Vintage without playsets of Merchant Scroll and
Brainstorm, there are still a lot of different directions we could be taking the card in to explore. The raw power is definitely still there, it’s all
about finding the correct way to harness it, and I’m not even sure the lists I’ve come up with at this point are more than the tip of the iceberg. It’s an
exciting time to finally get to play Vintage with regularity again!