As most SCG-readers will know, Meandeck put out an impressive amount of good new decks over the summer and fall… and as far as I know, this article won’t reveal a completely new idea to them, either. At least Matthieu (Toad at themanadrain.com) stated he had something similar in the works, when we shared the decklist for more input on the deck.
Still it’s nothing I’ve seen open talk about up to now, and it’s a sweet way to show it’s not only Northern American players who are trying to build new decks. It also seems like other players are slowly realizing how good the card defining this deck actually is, so I wanted to give a walk through on what Team CAB’s thoughts were when setting out to break this Kamigawa-card. It might even help you breaking other new cards, too.
Ok, I’ll stop fooling around now, and tell you what card I’m talking about, it’s the quite well known but rarely played Gifts Ungiven. Considering the interest it got directly after it’s release, we should have figured out it’s power even faster. As it was, it took my teammember Maxim Barkman an evening of T1 Highlander with a Gifts thrown in to call me next day and tell me that we should definitely break it.
After the first hype, everybody looked at Gifts Ungiven and decided that it’s worse than Intuition because of its cost, Accumulated Knowledge and tutoring for other 3-ofs, as well as being worse than Fact or Fiction because the opponent chooses what you get.
Well, that’s all kind of true. Gifts Ungiven is neither Fact or Fiction nor Intuition. In Vintage it can be close to an Instant-speed double Demonic Tutor for U3, though. I mean, if your opponent reveals Tinker, Yawgmoth’s Will, Ancestral Recall and Time Walk, with the mana to cast each of those cards, which would you want to give him? Would you give them an early Ancestral Recall or late Yawgmoth’s Will over anything else? If not, here’s your first Tutor, as they have only one more card left to bury.
Now, let’s think about Fact or Fiction some more – How often is it really your decision which pile you take? For me, my opponents regularly split the cards in a way where they decide which pile I’ll take, because they adjusted the power of the piles accordingly. Now think about Gifts… it is a Fact or Fiction where you can make your opponent choose the pile in the same way you were forced with the original. Not only that, but you decide which kind of card your Fact turns over (for example four Moxen is quite a powerful Gifts if you need mana).
So the first strategy in breaking Gifts had to be to maximize the amount of single broken cards in the deck, with the intention to make as many Gift-splits as bad for your opponent as possible.
This strategy to abuse Gifts has one problem, though – if you don’t have Yawgmoth’s Will in hand already (and especially if you Gifted for it at any time before during the game to shut out a different option), you’re moving your best cards into an area where you don’t have good access to them. This is a hard hit against Gifts, because your deck gets so much worse every time you use it, so that you will soon be out of threats and lose if the third or fourth-best cards in the deck are not good enough to win alone. Strong as they are, they are not regularly that good.
So we needed a way to make burying stuff from your deck a good thing. Just casting Will every game seemed like a good plan to do that (duh), so we tried to make it work. At best, Gifts Ungiven itself should fetch Yawgie’s Win, while already stocking the graveyard.
For that, Regrowth was the obvious first idea, but it didn’t work out too well, as we would have needed a second Regrowth-effect to be able to Gifts for Will, and there was no actually playable secondary Regrowth in Green in our opinion (double Green in the cost screwed Eternal Witness for us). Then at some point I read something about Recoup on the Wizards Vintage boards and it all clicked.
Recoup fit in perfectly. Because it has Flashback, I’d always get to play it after Gifts, and even a seven-mana Will is usually good enough, if you consider that you need four mana anyway for Gifts and what they’d have to give me over Recoup and Will in that case.
These facts also meant the deck would be controllish in nature, even though Gifts’ tutoring-power screams for a combo. To exploit that, we included a comboey finish that also worked well with Gifts and Recoup – Mana Severance and Goblin Charbelcher. How does Belcher work with Recoup? Well, with the help of Tinker, obviously. With the deck being focused on tutoring up powerful singletons (oh the irony), Darksteel Colossus (DS C) and Tinker seemed to be a natural backup plan anyway. How nice.
Aside: Why do I always end up building combo-control decks (anybody still remembers The Shining )? Anyway, let’s keep going…
Having a draw-engine that guaranteed us quality cards, but not many of them, we also chose to go with a heavy disruption suite. Heavy Blue makes Force of Will an auto-include, Duress is excellent right now anyway, and Mana Drain is just sweet with spells including three colorless mana in their casting cost and a game plan that ends later than turn 2.
As for the manabase, we knew we wanted four plus basics and five or more fetches because of Crucible of Worlds and would have to support at least three colors (U/b/r). So this is what we ended up with:
CAB – Gifted (first tested build)
Disruption (12)
4 Duress
4 Mana Drain
4 Force of Will
Draw&Search (13)
1 Ancestral Recall
4 Brainstorm
1 Fact or Fiction
4 Gifts Ungiven
1 Mystical Tutor
1 Vampiric Tutor
1 Demonic Tutor
Utility (5)
2 Recoup
1 Burning Wish
1 Goblin Charbelcher
1 Mana Severance
Broken (3)
1 Yawgmoth’s Will
1 Time Walk
1 Tinker
Backup (1)
1 Darksteel Colossus
Speed (9)
1 Mana Vault
1 Sol Ring
1 Black Lotus
1 Mana Crypt
5 Moxen
Lands (17)
1 Tolarian Academy
4 Polluted Delta
2 Flooded Strand
3 Volcanic Island
3 Underground Sea
3 Island
1 Swamp
The odd Burning Wish and back-up Recoup were nice utility in testing. Burning Wish just had insane synergy with removing your own sorceries from the game. Over all, the deck played well and felt really powerful.
We than decided to construct the sideboard in a way to compliment the Gifts Ungiven toolbox, at least where practical (a Gifts-toolbox vs. Belcher i.e. seems not very helpful, because when you can cast Gifts vs. them, you’re usually either winning or dead anyway).
Sideboard (15)
1 Echoing Truth
1 Lava Dart
1 Chainer’s Edict
1 Primitive Justice
2 Rack and Ruin
1 Engineered Plague
2 Chalice of the Void
1 Null Rod
1 Blood Moon
1 Gorilla Shaman
1 Chains of Mephistopheles
1 Blue Elemental Blast
1 Red Elemental Blast
I know this, like the maindeck, looks janky as hell. A ton of versatile or powerful one-ofs stuck together with mana and Gifts Ungiven to keep them going. Note that we expected quite a bit of Belcher and (powered) Affinity at the tournament the deck was meant for, so the sideboard reflects that. The cards were chosen in a way to let the different cards form patterns to allow us to sideboard multiple powerful cards against just about everything. In my opinion, the format has too many different decks to devote much specialized hate to a single deck. I’ll go through the cards one by one – this article is meant to show our thought process when making the deck after all:
Echoing Truth was so that post SB we had at least something to possibly remove Enchantments like Ground Seal, and it’s good against Dragon as well.
Lava Dart is great to find with Gifts in case you really need to kill a Goblin Welder or Xantid Swarm.
Chainer’s Edict can be wished for and is boarded vs. Aggro, where you only want to stall their beats for a few turns anyway.
Primitive Justice can be wished for and you still sometimes get multiple cards for one with it.
Rack and Ruin’s application should be obvious.
Engineered Plague shuts down Forbidden Orchard and Welder while still having more utility than – let’s say – Spawning Pit.
Chalice of the Void because we expected some combo, Chalice doesn’t hurt this deck to much but is strong vs. all combo-decks but Dragon.
Null Rod was for the Belcher we expected, and having one of these instead of CotV number three made first turn Tinker another near win.
Blood Moon stops Bazaar and Orchard while being a major threat for 4CC.
Gorilla Shaman is meant for Affinity – we expected some Type Two players to simply add Moxen to it – as well as Stax. He’s also quite nice at complementing Blood Moon vs. Control.
Chains of Mephistopheles was an idea I got when considering the other Controlish decks at the moment. They all use Intuition + AK or other direct means of card draw, while Gifted runs, well, Gifts. Cutting off the opponent from all his draw seemed like a good plan any time in the game. This is a card I would have loved to have more room for, but toolboxing through different threats seemed more powerful over all.
Blue Elemental Blast – The sideboard has few cards to handle Dragon or first turn Lackey, and this is also fine versus Welder, which is quite problematic.
With Red Elemental Blast the question is probably rather “why only one”. Quite simply, if I had more room, I’d use more Chains as long as nobody else is playing this deck. REB is here so you can Gifts for four disruption-spells vs. Control post sideboard.
During further testing we realized that the deck lacked a way to deal with big swarms sometimes, as well as Welders, and it showed in quite a few games. We also felt that more random broken cards would be extremely nice, so that there would be more options for lose/lose splits with Gifts Ungiven. In the end, we chose an extremely small White splash for the sheer power of Balance and the amount of mana acceleration convinced us to try out Mind Twist as another broken spell. The Welder-problem also let us decide in favor of a maindeck Fire / Ice.
Just what should we cut? We needed far too much room for broken cards and disruption, none of which we wanted to remove. That left only one thing – the kill. We had rarely needed Belcher-Severance; Darksteel Colossus would have been sufficient almost every time. And Balance as well as Mind Twist should win some random games on their own, probably more than the combo had won us, as well as providing more utility for the deck overall.
The only other thing not necessary for the deck to work were the back-up Recoup and Burning Wish. Burning Wishes gave enough additional options that it won out, so that’s what the deck looked like for the first tourney we took it to:
CAB – Gifted (mid-Nvember 2004)
Disruption (12)
4 Duress
4 Mana Drain
4 Force of Will
Draw&Search (13)
1 Ancestral Recall
4 Brainstorm
1 Fact or Fiction
4 Gifts Ungiven
1 Mystical Tutor
1 Vampiric Tutor
1 Demonic Tutor
Utility (4)
1 Recoup
1 Burning Wish
1 Fire / Ice
1 Gorilla Shaman
Broken (5)
1 Balance
1 Mind Twist
1 Yawgmoth’s Will
1 Time Walk
1 Tinker
Cleanup (1)
1 Darksteel Colossus
Speed (9)
1 Sol Ring
1 Black Lotus
1 Mana Crypt
1 Mana Vault
5 Moxen
Lands (17)
1 Tolarian Academy
4 Polluted Delta
2 Flooded Strand
3 Volcanic Island
2 Underground Sea
1 Tundra
3 Island
1 Swamp
Note: Yes I know this looks like a pile of brokeness with a random Darksteel Colossus thrown in. Please trust me, it’s not a joke, I T8’d both tournaments I took it to and didn’t kill with anything but DS C even once. My first comment was, “This is stupid, we can not use DS C alone for winning.” Well, we tried it, and it worked out really well. In the end, this deck usually wins by casting Yawgmoth’s Will, so what actually delivers the kill is not of too much importance, as long as it is fast. DSC makes Tinker broken alone, so that makes it the right choice so far.
For the sideboard, we knew we now wanted something to Burning Wish for in case Swords to Plowshares actually resolved, and we needed some better Enchantment-removal than Echoing Truth now that we had access to White. We ended up settling on Seal of Cleansing (there was no good Sorcery) instead of Truth and Decree of Justice got its slot from the Gorilla Shaman. We misjudged the amount of Affinity and moved the Gorilla Shaman to the maindeck as a 61st metagame card (something else quite a few opponents wouldn’t want to give us). There wasn’t too much of it in the end, and we should just have went with 60, but it luckily didn’t hurt, either.
This is the sideboard we used:
Sideboard (15)
1 Decree of Justice
1 Lava Dart
1 Chainer’s Edict
1 Primitive Justice
1 Seal of Cleansing
2 Rack and Ruin
1 Engineered Plague
1 Null Rod
2 Chalice of the Void
1 Blood Moon
1 Chains of Mephistopheles
1 Blue Elemental Blast
1 Red Elemental Blast
We took Gifted to the first German proxy-tournament in Berlin, where 45 players showed up. A little bit dissappointing, considering there was a Mox Sapphire up for grabs and we finally had a proxy-tournament in Germany, but at least there were very few bad decks thanks to the proxies. In the end, we took 2nd (me), 6th (Maxim Barkman) and 15th (Kim Kluck, who had taken up the deck the night before). Oh, and against typical German custom, we also finally played out the Top 8 – no sucking around with tie-breakers to make decide who finally gets the prize. Nice.
What we learned
None of us had problems with getting DS C killed, so that seemed to be fine. Mind Twist was worse than expected, the four Duress usually cut the opponents’ hand to pieces without it. Gorilla Shaman was superfluous, as mentioned. The last card that was sometimes great and sometimes annoying was Mana Vault, so these were the cards we considered replacing:
Mind Twist
Gorilla Shaman
Mana Vault
Engineered Explosives filled a hole in the deck, giving us a maindeck way to remove Oath of Druids and other annoying permanents as well as allowing for more Welder-hunting. So we added that instead of Shaman and went back to sixty cards. We decided to keep Mana Vault in to get a better impression of how often it was really good or bad, so this is what we played in the November Dülmen tourney:
CAB – Gifted
Disruption (12)
4 Duress
4 Mana Drain
4 Force of Will
Draw&Search (13)
1 Ancestral Recall
4 Brainstorm
1 Fact or Fiction
4 Gifts Ungiven
1 Mystical Tutor
1 Vampiric Tutor
1 Demonic Tutor
Utility (4)
1 Recoup
1 Burning Wish
1 Fire / Ice
1 Engineered Explosives
Broken (4)
1 Balance
1 Yawgmoth’s Will
1 Time Walk
1 Tinker
Cleanup (1)
1 Darksteel Colossus
Speed (9)
1 Sol Ring
1 Black Lotus
1 Mana Crypt
1 Mana Vault
5 Moxen
Lands (17)
1 Tolarian Academy
4 Polluted Delta
2 Flooded Strand
3 Volcanic Island
2 Underground Sea
1 Tundra
3 Island
1 Swamp
As for the sideboard, Seal of Cleansing had been rather bad and Rack and Ruin was not influential enough. Being off-color had been a main problem, so we started looking for Blue alternatives. With the Explosives main, we thought that no Enchantment-removal would be necessary, against Oath the plan was stopping Oath, dropping Blood Moon/Plague before a token hit, or just winning with Will anyway.
What we wanted instead were more cards to gain tempo against Workshop that were still useful vs. Oath. That’s where we settled on Annul, which is insane vs. Workshop if you’re going first, and still fine going second. We wanted a bit of true Artifact-removal, though, so there was no room for more than two copies of Annul. Here is my complete Dülmen sideboard:
Sideboard (15)
1 Decree of Justice
1 Lava Dart
1 Chainer’s Edict
2 Annul
1 Primitive Justice
1 Rack and Ruin
1 Engineered Plague
1 Null Rod
2 Chalice of the Void
1 Blood Moon
1 Chains of Mephistopheles
1 Blue Elemental Blast
1 Red Elemental Blast
Only Kim Kluck and myself took Gifted to 2004’s December-Dülmen (76 players), where I managed to get into the Top 8 in 7th seat again (T8 there is not played out, though) and Kim finished 20th, losing multiple games to play errors.
In our opinion the maindeck performed very well, with Engineered Explosives being a bit underpowered, but a nice catch-all. Mana Vault is still on the list of things that might get cut, but the extra fast mana is just too important in some of the games, so it stays for now.
The sideboard still needs some work and, as always, will also change according to the metagame. At this point in time I’m personally thinking about going with a full four Chalice, but that’s just because I hate losing to combo so much. Aside from combo matchups, the strategy of having overlapping sideboard cards feels really good, we usually had a few extra bombs or much-needed solutions against everything we met post sideboard.
Overall during testing as well as tournament experience, the deck is performing quite well, with the only not favorable matchups being the more random (as in “starting hand dependant”) decks in the field (DeathLong and Stax) as well as ToadySlaver, which seemed to be pretty much 50:50. Against anything else we have winning records so far, even though the testing is far from complete. Doomsday is still missing, for example, due to the low amount of time it actually gets played over here, making it low priority.
As for playing this thing, its gameplan is pretty straightforward once you have played enough combo-control. Stay alive for ~4 turns, then get Gifts going and out-broken just about every other deck. That being said, the deck is pretty hard to actually play perfectly, because weighing a Gifts for any given situation is often insanely hard. The good news is, even if you don’t set it up perfectly, Gifts Ungiven is regularly strong enough to still win you the game. When your opponent drops an Ancestral Recall and a Time Walk into your hand, that’s quite a good feeling, let me tell ya.
Well, I hope you enjoyed getting a look into the heads of Team CAB while we’re building and tweaking a new deck, I’ll have some fun letting my opponent solve unsolvable problems for the time it lasts.
Carsten Kötter
a.k.a. Mon, Goblin Chief
Team CAB
High Priest of the Church of BLA