Perhaps the most powerful card to be unleashed for Vintage from Champions of Kamigawa Block is none other than Gifts Ungiven. On its face, the card appears busted. The card is a design cross-breed the restricted Fact or Fiction and the heavily abused Intuition. The trick and the explanation for why it has taken so long to find a suitable home for the card is that the obvious use of Gifts: using Recoup with Yawgmoth’s Will appeared too expensive to be viable. The Germans used this win combo from day one of its legality – but everyone else dismissed it.
Two permutations have finally taken root. The first is “Shortbus Severance Belcher” developed by Andy Probasco of Team Shortbus. He focused the deck around a Goblin Charbelcher kill using Mana Severance as one of the Gifts targets. He included Goblin Welders to boost the inherent graveyard synergy and add flexibility and protection to his mana supply and win condition. Although cards like Gifts Ungiven promote and encourage creativity and reward context specific decision making, the “standard” gifts was: Tinker, Recoup, Yawgmoth’s Will and Mana Severance. Andy has written at length about his deck and so I’ll shuttle all curious readers to his article now – just come back when you are done. But as with Doomsday, to say that something is “standard” does not mean that it is usually or even frequently the correct gifts. Gifts is a very malleable and situation specific card that requires careful consideration of your options and its tactical and strategic value. Another variant of this came about with the inclusion of Mindslaver.
The other primary gifts list is one developed by team Meandeck and my teammate Mathieu Durand in particular. Starting with a nice shell for a Auriok Salvagers control deck that used Regrowth instead of Recoup he transferred his efforts into a revised Gifts-Belcher list that has come to be known as Meandeck Gifts, Gifts or Gift.fr. Carl Winter piloted this list to the highest placing finish a Gifts list at the most recent Waterbury.
Components Common to All Gifts Lists – the Gifts Shell:
Every Gifts list has a common core of cards. When you boil the deck down to its shared components, we see that there are, at most, eleven slots to play with. Forty-nine slots remain shared in all variants because they are viewed, justifiably, as requisite components.
All of the Gifts lists share these cards:
1) 24-26 Mana Sources with 24-25 being the norm
2) 4 Force of Will, 4 Mana Drains, and 4 Brainstorm
3) The 4 Gifts Targets: Yawg Will, Recoup, Tinker and one other component (either Mana Severance or Burning Wish)
4) The actual win condition (Usually Belcher or Colossus)
5) At least two Gifts
6) 1 Ancestral Recall, 1 Time Walk, 1 Demonic Tutor and 1 Mystical Tutor
7) Most have one Fact or Fiction
That’s 49 cards. The remaining variance is in the last 11 cards:
In SSB it’s:
2 Welder
1 Pantybus/ Echoing Truth
1 Slaver/ 3rd Welder
4 Thirst
2 Duress
In the Belcherless list it’s:
3 Thirst For Knowledge,
1 Burning Wish
3rd Gifts,
1-2 Skeletal Scryings
2-3 Phyrexian Furance
And a pair of Duress.
In my Intuition list, I filled up the eleven variable slots with these cards:
3rd Gifts
3 Duress
4 Accumulated Knowledge
3 Intuition
When I sat down to really figure out how to improve and tune an optimal Gifts list, I began with the Shortbus list because I had the least amount of experience with it. I knew that I didn’t want Phyrexian Furnaces, so I wanted to see what worked in the Shortbus list that wasn’t in the Meandeck list.
There are two big differences between the three lists. The first is the win condition. The second is the draw engine. I have a lot of respect for the work that the Germans, my teammates, Ben Kowal, Andy Probasco, and Team Shortbus have done with Gifts Belcher. But there is much work to be done and a lot of ground to be covered.
The Win Condition: Colossus versus Charbelcher
I am convinced that running Goblin Charbelcher is wrong. It’s not a “metagame choice.” It’s a question of better and worse. The Darksteel Colossus path to victory is much more suitable to what the deck is trying to accomplish. To preface, I should mention that the two win conditions are not mutually exclusive. I will explain why one might be inclined to run both in a bit.
As a starting point, using Charbelcher requires that one also use Mana Severance.
Here is the standard SSB “Gifts”: Tinker, Yawg Will, Mana Severance and Recoup
If they give you Tinker and Severance, then the combo costs eight mana to win on the spot. If they give you Recoup and Severance, the theory is that you can Severance to optimize your draws and then Recoup the Yawg Will or Tinker as soon as you can afford to pay the mana.
They won’t give you Yawg Will.
Here is the Meandeck “Gifts” pile: Tinker, Yawg Will, Recoup, and Time Walk
They won’t give you Yawg Will.
If they give you Time Walk and Tinker thinking that you are playing Shortbus Severance Belcher, then you win on the spot. You Tinker up Colossus, Time Walk and then Recoup the Time Walk for a mere five mana on the first turn.
If they give you Recoup and Time Walk, all the better. You Recoup the Tinker and Time Walk and then Recoup Time Walk and win for only seven mana on the first turn.
The idea of Burning Wish is that with all your draw and search you will be able to find the Burning Wish before you have to pass them a turn. That way you can: Time Walk, Recoup, Yawg Will, and Time Walk and then Burning Wish and Time Walk. It only takes two swings with Colossus before they die. If you even just Time Walk and Tinker without a follow up Time Walk, you are likely to have seen that single additional disruption spell that will keep them from stopping you for one more turn while you finish the job.
It seems to me that the Colossus kill is superior for a number of reasons. First, it is simpler. The deck wants to Time Walk and swing. It requires very little disruption to protect the Colossus before his final swing – usually just a Force of Will or a Mana Drain. But if you are worried about that – don’t be. The mere fact of having resolved Gifts means that your opponent is in a tough spot. Also, even if the Colossus is removed you are sitting pretty. You have a Yawg Will ready to explode. All you need to do is find that Burning Wish and play Tendrils out of your sideboard for a few storm. Second, Time Walk is a vastly superior combo component to Mana Severance. Taking turns is amazing and oddly under-rated. The more turns you can take, the further and further beyond your opponent will be.
Not running Burning Wish was a mistake if you wanted to kill with Darksteel Colossus. The Meandeck lists is really about abusing three cards: Time Walk, Yawgmoth’s Will, and Tinker – in that order. Time Walk is incredibly central. Taking more turns draws out the game a little more, buying you time and tempo as you develop your mana and see more cards to just explode. Burning Wish enables you to Time Walk one final time ensuring they have no chance to explode before your final swing with Colossus.
For example: Let’s say you have just cast Gifts Ungiven and blown most of your hand to protect it. You Gifted for: Time Walk, Recoup, Yawgmoth’s Will, and Tinker. They gave you Time Walk and Recoup. Your only other cards in hand are Fetchland and Brainstorm. And your board state is as follows:
Island, Island, Mox Ruby, Mox Pearl, Underground Sea
Your graveyard is:
Brainstorm, Polluted Delta, Duress, Force of Will, Yawgmoth’s Will, Tinker, and Gifts Ungiven.
At this point, you untap and play Time Walk. You draw a card and play a land. You can Brainstorm now and see what you get and play the Fetchland to shuffle. If you get some insane stuff or more acceleration, you can just go off. But if you aren’t quite there yet – you can Recoup the Tinker and just Tinker – or you might even be able to just Yawgmoth’s Will. Neither play is really that strong in this position. Let’s just say that you Recoup the Time Walk and flashback Time Walk. Now you see one more card and drop another land. At this point, you have seen five more cards than you otherwise would have. Sure, Recoup Yawgmoth’s Will now costs seven – but you are far more likely to just win as a result. The trick is simply to find the Burning Wish to replay the Time Walk so that your opponent doesn’t get another turn. If you can Burning Wish before you have to play the Yawgmoth’s Will – you’ll be in an even better position. Merely taking Time Walks permits the deck to draw cards off the top, which will significantly enhance the chances of you just winning.
The biggest thing people miss is the fact that Burning Wish enables a secondary win condition while preserving as many maindeck slots as possible. The focus on Yawgmoth’s Will very much suits using a Tendrils Wish target. My teammates have taken it a step further and use a Tendrils in the maindeck as well. With Rebuild, this is certainly a viable plan and often quite a surprise. Since the deck is so focused on Yawgmoth’s Will – it requires very little to ramp up to lethal storm.
Tinker for Colossus is always a powerful play. By itself, Belcher too frequently is more a pest than a win condition, especially when raw-dogging it for a few points of damage a turn. It requires Mana Severance as a combo component instead of Time Walk. All things equal, I’d just rather have Time Walk than a dead card.
When I sat down to test with SSB the first card that stuck out as something to cut was Goblin Welder. Without Mindslaver, Goblin Welder is little more than a cute trick. Sure, you can weld in Lotus or the Belcher to raw-dog Belch them once more – but that really isn’t worth the Goblin Welder slot in my view.
The consensus seems to be settling around Colossus. I think that if you run the full Slaver components then Welder is justifiable. Mindslaver itself is a giant threat with Goblin Welder. But if you aren’t running Mindslaver, then you shouldn’t be running Welders.
The Draw Engine
1) Thirst For Knowledge
The second thing I found to be irritating about both Gifts lists was Thirst for Knowledge. At least the Severance Belcher list had some more artifacts to discard. Matthieu’s list just had the Colossus and the several Furnaces aside from artifact accelerants.
First, discarding a Mox to Thirst is not acceptable. Period. The only place I want Moxen is in play. This deck is voraciously mana hungry. Gifts Ungiven itself is not only expensive – but the combo requires as much mana as you can muster to go off as quickly as possible. Trading off a moxen for a card is not a great plan. Specifically, discarding an artifact is “Teh Suck” when the vast majority of your artifacts – in fact all but one – are mana accellerants that when added to the board enhance your game plan enabling you to play more spells at the right time.
Second, discarding two cards to Thirst is not acceptable. Period. Matthieu’s list often did this. The more I pared and tuned the deck, the worse Thirst became in this regard. With Welders and more artifacts, I can see Thirst being a legitimate component. But in Matthieu’s list, you are forced to run jank like Furnace. And in Andy’s list, you still have to hold back a bit with the Thirsts. If you are running Belcher and Colossus, I don’t think that having two non-accelerants to discard justifies playing Thirst either.
The primary problem with Thirst, in my view, is the requirement that you discard an artifact. To take full advantage of it, you need to go the Slaver route and run Pentavus, Slaver, and the like. This fills the deck up with cards that you really don’t need. It’s so much easier to just win with Colossus and Time Walk. That leaves us with a dilemma. We can run a tried and true draw engine or we can sacrifice the draw engine for a more elegant and suitable win condition.
The primary complaint I had with SSB – apart from Welder – is the same complaint I have playing Slaver lists: I want every card to be immediately awesome. Sometimes you’d have really janky draws of Pentavus, Recoup, black cards, and Welders and cards that aren’t very good together. In a tight control mirror or against any good deck, having dead cards in your opening hand that become good with Thirst is just not good enough for me. I hated drawing Welders and expensive artifacts. Granted, these janky cards become a lot better when you run them all together with Thirsts and Welders. There are also enough jank in the deck as is: particularly if you want to run Burning Wish. Ever draw a hand with Burning Wish, Recoup, Mana Severance, and Mindslaver? I have.
Thirst makes a lot more sense in a deck where discarding an artifact is a huge threat: such as Slaver. If you were to include the Slaver or Titan combo into the deck, this would make a potent threat and would be a deadly secondary kill. But without relying on Slaver or using lots of Furnaces, I simply do not like Thirst. I don’t like Furnace either, so this card is basically down to discarding Colossus and artifact mana in my list.
Thirst has a high price to play it without giving, in my opinion, much in return. If you aren’t running the Slaver kill with Welders, I see no value in Thirst. Playing Thirst to draw three and discard two is unacceptable. There has to be a better draw engine. And there is.
2) Skeletal Scrying
Matthieu uses multiple Skeletal Scryings on top of a few Thirsts. This has merit. Scrying is not a bad card. It can remove artifacts in your graveyard to turn off an opposing Welder. It is another Gifts target. And it’s very flexible.
My problem with Scrying was unique in the decks I have tested Scrying in. With 3CC and decks of that ilk, you had little trouble doing some broken Scryings. The difference was that this deck has even more acceleration and can do even more broken Scryings. I ran into an obstacle I have never faced with Scrying before: not having enough cards in the graveyard to remove or not having enough cards that I want to remove. The deck has so much acceleration that Scrying just wasn’t very functional. It was just as janky as running the clunky artifacts.
Given the way I’ve constructing the victory condition, I would agree that Scrying is superior to Thirst. But that wasn’t saying much.
Although I certainly wasn’t disgusted with Scrying and Thirst, I wasn’t satisfied with it either. I’m sure many of you who play Gifts probably agree that neither draw engine really “clicks.”
That led me to try:
3) Intuition/ Accumulated Knowledge
Intuition has tremendous synergy with the whole Gifts combo. Intuition just for bombs as you would in Tog as you are about to Yawgmoth’s Will is a common play with this deck since your Gifts is going to get you Yawgmoth’s Will anyway. If your graveyard is already filled with bombs, then Intuition for Recoup, Yawgmoth’s Will and any other card is likely to be a solid play as well.
A deck built around Yawgmoth’s Will has always seemed to like Intuition and Accumulated Knowledge. Tog does and Goth Slaver does. This deck has even more acceleration than either of those decks, so I figured it would be fantastic. A lot of the time it worked exactly as you might imagine. I would have a very robust draw engine that would get me into a strong control role and poised to combo easily with Gifts.
However, I was surprised to discover that this draw engine was still imperfect. Although many games would play out as I imagined, the deck was conditional. A third of the time the time I’d Intuition for just cards to complement the Gifts. Another third of the time I’d draw useless Accumulated Knowledges. The rest of the time it played out like a charm. After getting a lot of testing in, I decided that I was simply doing too much work to win. Although I hadn’t given up on this configuration, I wanted to experiment some more.
4) Merchant Scroll
The card that struck me was Merchant Scroll. For UU1 you can find and play Ancestral Recall. I don’t know why I thought of it – but it seemed like something I should test. I suggested it to my teammates and they used two Merchant Scrolls and two Skeletal Scryings as a draw engine.
One of the things I noticed about Merchant Scroll the more I played with it and tested it is that Merchant Scrolling up Ancestral immediately was often the wrong play. Without protection it was likely to get countered or Duressed. My own Duresses weren’t as good as I hoped at protecting it because it often meant I was playing Duress and Ancestral on different turns. A turn later they would be able to stop it even if I cleared their hand the turn before.
The moment of clarity I had was when I decided to Merchant Scroll for Force of Will to protect my Gifts Ungiven in a game against a teammate.
At that moment I realized something critical. I realized that I wanted Misdirections.
This is a good time to transition into my discussion about Disruption:
Disruption
Let me just get this out of the way: Phyrexian Furnace is not very good right now. The inclusion of Furnace is a necessary card if you are running any number of Thirsts and no other artifacts aside from the mana and Colossus.
I recently wrote an article for the dailies on this site about interaction. If many of the decks in Vintage have the same interactive components:
4 Force of Will
4 Mana Drain
Or
4 FoW
4 Null Rod
5 Wastelands
Etc
It seems to me that the difference between any two decks is a) acceleration ratios to mana costs and b) the quantity of interactive spells.
For example. If Control Slaver has 4 FoW and 4 Mana Drain and I have 4 FoW and 4 Mana Drain, how do I win that match? You can do it by using more efficient cards and more acceleration to race Mana Drain or at least pressure the opponent sufficiently that they can’t stop you OR you can run more disruption.
For that reason I was really excited to play with four Duress. Four Duress seemed like a huge difference. Maximizing my interactive cards would almost insure that my Gifts would resolve – right? Moreover, it would protect the combo from any would be threats.
I was wrong. I think it has to do with the fact that I was disappointed in the draw engines I was testing. As I increased my count of Merchant Scrolls, I found Duress just got in the way. It would push back my Gifts a turn. It wouldn’t synergize with the Scroll -> Ancestral Recall play very well. So I added Misdirections instead. They helped protect the Gifts combo and my Merchant Scroll for Ancestral Recall play. It really focuses the deck on doing one thing: winning. The deck can be quite effectively at trading board position for tempo. The play of Gifts Ungiven is so inherently powerful that it almost requires your opponent to stop you in order to win. Misdirection is a free way of protecting yourself.
Suddenly, the whole deck clicked together and I’m very happy with it.
Here is my decklist:
Creatures (1)
Lands (12)
Spells (47)
- 4 Brainstorm
- 4 Mana Drain
- 1 Vampiric Tutor
- 1 Mystical Tutor
- 1 Yawgmoth's Will
- 4 Force of Will
- 1 Mana Vault
- 1 Sol Ring
- 1 Demonic Tutor
- 3 Island
- 1 Time Walk
- 1 Ancestral Recall
- 1 Mana Crypt
- 4 Gifts Ungiven
- 1 Burning Wish
- 4 Merchant Scroll
- 3 Misdirection
- 1 Tinker
- 1 Rebuild
- 1 Black Lotus
- 1 Fact or Fiction
- 1 Recoup
- 1 Lotus Petal
- 1 Mox Emerald
- 1 Mox Jet
- 1 Mox Pearl
- 1 Mox Ruby
- 1 Mox Sapphire
With one Tendrils of Agony in the sideboard.
I am very happy with this list. The only card I’m not quite sure about is the Vampiric Tutor. It may become a Library of Alexandria or an Echoing Truth.
Now let me talk about the deck and its weaknesses:
Doesn’t this deck get destroyed by Chalice for 0?
Although the deck has a ton of acceleration, the answer is actually no. With all the tutors and Merchant Scrolls, finding the Rebuild is quite easy. And Burning Wish can answer Chalice as well. Also, since the deck isn’t relying on Duresses – you can just find Islands all day long. In many ways this deck is actually mono-Blueish – it is very close to BBS. Although the Gifts combo requires Black and Red – even if I just fetch out Islands in the early game, I never seem to have problems getting the Black and the Red by the time I need it. Moreover, this deck has Mana Vault as well as Sol Ring. The quantity of Scrolls and Brainstorms means that I am very likely to see one of those pretty soon. It’s the whole singleton in Tog concept – you will see your singletons when you have that much search and draw. Finally, because of Misdirections you are far more likely to actually stop the Chalice or other mean bad cards from hitting. This deck is vulnerable to Chalice – of course – but it has lots of maindeck solutions. Cutting the Vampiric Tutor for Echoing Truth would only enhance this more.
Your Deck has No Draw Engine?!
It is true that I’m not running a traditional draw engine. But the more I’ve played this deck, the more I’ve discovered the fallacy in the notion that I need a traditional draw engine. I have four Gifts Ungiven. I can use Gifts not unlike BBS used to use Fact or Fiction:
Gifts on turn 2 for:
Merchant Scroll, Fact or Fiction, Gifts Ungiven, and Brainstorm. Most of the time, my opponent will give me Fact and Gifts. And it’s amazing for me. You can swap in tutors like a Vamp for one of those cards if you’d like too.
Some plays I’ll make are to Gifts for something like this:
Mox Sapphire, Mystical Tutor, Merchant Scroll, Gifts Ungiven. You’d be surprised what people give you. The possibilities are endless.
But moreover, the real game plan is simple:
1) Merchant Scroll for Ancestral and get it to resolve
2) Play Gifts and get it to resolve
3) Win the Game
You don’t actually need to go into the midgame that far before you just win. That’s the beauty of Gifts. Gifts Ungiven is card advantage and an auto-win combo. Although it isn’t strictly a draw spell – this configuration I’ve designed has made me rethink the meaning of what a draw spell is and how it functions.
I can see people not being sold on Merchant Scrolls. The only piece of advice I can give you is to tell you to do this: Merchant Scroll for Brainstorm and see what happens. You’ll be surprised. Moreover, Merchant Scroll is just another way to tutor chain for Yawgmoth’s Will or Tinker if you are so inclined. It also finds Fact and Gifts – both solid cards.
This is the most aggressive variant of the Gifts archetype to emerge. It has very little trouble dispatching with Control decks. The surprising thing has been that in my testing so far, I’ve been owning Fish and Stax! The Merchant Scroll for Rebuild play is strong against both decks. The maindeck Rebuild also makes your Tendrils back up plan much easier to pull off. I also played a dozen games against a very good Food Chain player and I won every single game. One game I went land, Mana Vault, Lotus Merchant Scroll and Gifts Ungiven. He went Mountain, Goblin Lackey. He never got another turn. The deck has basically two kinds of hands: it has the completely insane “I win by turn 3” broken hands. And it has the all land and Blue cards hand. The latter kind of hand will turn good – but you just need to think about whether you can keep it against some decks.
I urge you to try this list because it truly is busted. The dense acceleration means that I resolve a turn 2 Gifts far more frequently than you might expect. Turn 1 Brainstorm often means turn 2 four mana.
Now that I’ve had the chance to test this deck out a lot, I’m having trouble remembering why people were running less than four Gifts before. Gifts Ungiven is truly busted. Why not take advantage of it? Think creatively and be flexible. Go for the throat and play aggressively. This is the new BBS, not a genuine control deck. Have fun!