Gifts Ungiven

As I've said previously, my basic pattern for buying any new set is to start by picking up a full common/uncommon playset as a unit (that's four of each common and uncommon card in the set). This saves me the trouble of trying to guess which commons and uncommons will be useful in, say, the Extended lifespan of the set. It's also more economical over even a moderate time window, especially as some uncommons pick up value. I expect Path to Exile to be that kind of uncommon, for example.

After that core purchase, I then look to pick up rares that I expect to want to use, with an eye especially toward picking up now those rares that will go up in price for much of the foreseeable future. For example, I picked up my Elspeths for 8 bucks each when the set came out; my local store is now offering 20 dollars credit for Elspeth these days.

In our ideal world, all the rares work like that. Well, in my ideal world, anyway. However, some rares are clearly and immediately good. These cards still tend to rise in price over time, so we want to get them sooner rather than later.

Click through to the extended for my purchases...

When I first started considering Noble Hierarch in Standard, my thoughts initially went to building a straight-up Bant deck. However, after a pause to reposition my thoughts a bit, I realized that there was no requirement to use all three of the Hierarch's colors. Pretty clearly if you just want green, it's almost universally better to go with an elf, but if you wanted, say, green and white...

...and if, perhaps, you were planning on running out a 3-mana Legendary tree who would make the Hierarch hit for 2...

That prompted the deck list in the extended entry. Click through to see it.

Deck lists went up this week the January 24th PTQ in San Diego, which should be the last set of pre-Conflux PTQ results we see.

First, was that attendance correct? 74? That's awfully low for California. I'd buy it if someone said they'd dropped a "1" from the beginning of that number.

The winning deck was a blue-green-white build with a wide range of utility creatures including Birds, Teeg, Rhox War Monk, Archmage, Vendilion Clique, and Venser. This was backed up with Bant Charm, Spell Snare, and double Jitte and Sword of Fire and Ice. In fact, in what is necessarily an act of convergence and not replication (since Kenneth Ellis's win at San Diego came before Flores made his post) it looks a lot like the Mike Flores re-do of Critical Mass that he posted a little while ago.

The sideboard includes an even distribution of Affinity, Storm, and graveyard hate.

The rest of the San Diego top eight was fairly combo-tastic, with three Storm decks and two copies of Elves. The other two were Affinity and RGW Sligh (NB - I may be misusing the term here, but that's what other people are calling it, so I'll stick with that).

There will be some post-Conflux PTQs on the 14th, two weeks ahead of my first PTQ in the new format. I'll watch those results with some interest, as well as whatever Magic League results show up in the meantime. I don't expect significant changes, although Hierarch will probably go into any Ellis-style decks, and Path to Exile means that All-In Red is an even worse choice than it already was (it may also impact Affinity's performance). Beyond that, I don't have any solid predictions for Conflux-dependent change in the PTQ metagame.

Addendum - After I wrote this, but before posting, I read Brian David-Marshall's most recent The Week that Was where he tells us that two Modesto-area players got into a car accident on the way home from this PTQ. I'll quote a bit here:

After playing in a Pro Tour qualifier for Honolulu two weeks ago, Robert Cash and Kenneth Ellis were involved in a car accident driving home from San Diego to Modesto. Robert was killed in the crash and Kenneth was seriously injured. My deepest condolences go out to Robert's family and friends and my wishes for a speedy and complete recovery go out to Kenneth and his family.

Although I didn't know Robert and Kenneth personally, they've both been going to many of the same PTQs I've been to, and were part of the friendly PTQ crowd. I'm very sorry to hear about Robert, and I hope Kenneth recovers sooner rather than later.

Magic came out when I was a high school student, so there really hadn't been a lot of time for teachers to know what we were doing in between classes or to be able to usefully talk to us about how the game works. These days, however, gamers my age are the teachers, and games are an excellent way for them to connect with students.

Over at Mana Nation, Dan Eckstein recently started writing Magic: the Classroom, a column about teaching his students how to play the game, and seeing where they go with the ideas and tools he gives them. So far, the first two columns have been excellent introductions to key concepts in making a competitive, structurally sound deck. They are:

In The Rule of Nine, Dan tells us that "When you design a deck all you really need is nine cards." It's a great piece that will inform you if you're at the stage of just throwing a pile of good cards that you like together, and you're wondering why you don't win all that much with them.

In The Curve, Dan discusses the eponymous game concept, taking us from the basics of making a coherent deck into the somewhat more advanced realm of making sure we have actual plays when we need them.

I recommend both articles, especially as primers for newer players.

DeckCheck has a top eight for us from a GP Trial for Hannover, giving us one of our first views of a post-Conflux Extended top eight. I'll link to the decks of interest in the extended, with notes on their standout traits.

Someone asked why we see Shizo and Okina in Doran/Junk decks these days, but not Eiganjo. I wrote a reply in the Wizards forums that I think is worth reprinting, so here it is:

Each nonbasic you add to your mana base increases your exposure to auto-losses from moon effects. So you're doing a cost-benefit analysis for each land slot to see if it should be a basic or something else. The Doran deck is going to naturally want to start with some combination of fetches and shocks to make sure you hit your turn one, two, and three mana marks, so much of the base is already spoken for. From there, you need to have a certain number of basics to (1) fetch, (2) reduce your damage from fetching later-game lands, and (3) increase your resiliency against the moons.

Eiganjo makes Doran a little tougher if he's running into big blockers, or if someone's trying to burn him out. Shizo actually solves that blockers problem, and Doran's going to be Smothered, Putrefied and Exiled way more often than he's going to be burned, so that's not an especially useful ability. It's almost certainly not worth the additional exposure.

The Moon effects force us to be more honest with our mana bases, an observation I've heard in the last few months from both Rich Hagon and Mike Flores (Mike in a top eight podcast, and Rich commenting on the fact that the Pro Tour floor at Berlin saw far more basics in play than the parallel Standard events). Each time you choose something other than a basic land, you must do a serious cost-benefit analysis to decide if that's worth the increased exposure.

Writing for Evolution in Spain, Juan Miguel Garcia reports on a recent GP Trial for Hannover. You can click here to read Juan's tournament report, including a breakdown of the tournament metagame, the top eight deck lists, and a report on the top eight. Mind you, if you can't read Spanish, you may not get much out of the tournament report section itself. But for those of you who aren't good with Spanish, the deck lists for the top eight are in English.

As Juan points out, five of the decks in the top eight include Conflux cards. I recently looked at another GP Trial which saw Might of Alara and Path to Exile making their way into Zoo decks, and Knight of the Reliquary showing up in its expected place in a Loam deck. Click through to the extended entry for the interesting tidbits from the Evolution top eight.

Gifts Ungiven is an excellent card.

I like searching decks. I like searching my deck to get a card I need to set up an engine. I like searching my opponent's deck to remove a card they need. As a consequence, I really enjoy the idea of Gifts Ungiven, and I've been thinking about whether a Gifts deck is a good call for the current Extended season.

Of course, saying, "I plan on playing Gifts" is a lot like saying, "I plan on cooking with flour." While it may constrain what you might possibly be making, it doesn't actually say much about what you will be making. With that in mind, I wanted to take some time to think about Gifts. And because I'm already a bit of a research wonk, I decided to look back through the history of Gifts Ungiven in Extended PTQs.

But first, let's take a look at the card itself. Unsurprisingly, given the name of this site, I get a lot of searches coming here asking questions like "How do I use Gifts Ungiven?" So, how do we use it?

At its most basic level, Gifts is card advantage. You will end up with two cards in hand for one card expended - basic card advantage.

Expanding on that, there are a number of ways people use the card.

To get what I need

Many Gifts decks include a framework that basically lets you Gifts for a defined pair of regrowth cards along with one or two targets you actually want. For example, you might have Eternal Witness and Reclaim in your deck. If you subsequently find that you absolutely must get your single copy of Fracturing Gust to close out that pesky Affinity deck, you can Gifts for Witness, Reclaim, Gust, and something else. Even if the opponent puts your Gust in the graveyard, you're guaranteed to get at least one effect in your hand, whether its Witness or Reclaim, that can get that Gust back.

To get what I need right now

If you look at, say, Patrick Chapin's Gifts deck from PT Berlin, you'll see that he has three different sweepers in the deck (in his case, Firespout, Wrath, and Engineered Explosives). In this case, instead of needing to rely on reanimation, you can be sure that you'll get some form of the type of card you need, simply because you have at least three options, so you can only ever lose two of them to the graveyard post-Gifts.

This is also why we want to diversify between Basic and Snow-Covered Basic lands in our decks - so we can Gifts for Forest, Snow-Covered Forest, Breeding Pool, Stomping Ground, and guarantee we get a Forest immediately.

To set up an engine

There are a lot of engines that you can put in place quickly with Gifts regardless of where the actual cards end up in the Gifts split. Consider the Tron player who Gifts for Mindslaver, Academy Ruins, Life from the Loam, and something else. No matter where you put those cards, unless you can attack the Tron player's graveyard, they're going to get the Ruins out, get the Slaver back, and lock you out. Similarly, you can Gifts for a Life from the Loam and three Onslaught cycling lands, and you suddenly have a super-powered card draw engine.

So that's how you can use Gifts. How have people actually used it? Click through to the extended to see how Gifts has shown up in the last three Extended PTQ seasons.

Over at the Evolution blog, Ruben Gonzalez asks "Que fue de Battle of Wits?"

Or, in English, "What happened to Battle of Wits?"

In the article, Ruben looks at Battle circa 2005, with Sam Gomersall's list, then looks at how the list was updated for 2008 by Alex Yatsenko of Russia, who bravely piloted it to a 5-3 finish (including one win over Steve Sadin, who picked an even worse deck to try and win a Pro Tour with).

Ruben has some interesting commentary in his article, including a discussion about how the 2008 deck has focused even more on actually finding a copy of Battle, along with other changes to try and make the deck more effective. Once again, you'll need to be able to read Spanish (or enjoy the quirks of machine translation) to read the article, with the added bonus this time around that the deck lists are also in Spanish. Still, if you can swing it, it's a good read, even if you (like me) don't relish the idea of showing up to a tournament with four decks instead of the requisite one.

(Sorry about the lack of correct diacriticals. I'm trying to figure that out.)

We have another post-Conflux top eight list from an Extended GP trial, this time in Berlin. Here's the DeckCheck link.

Click through to the extended entry for comments on the deck lists.

iMTG is a new launch point meant to aggregate a wide range of Magic blogs, podcasts, and other materials, giving Magic players an easy place to keep up with new content on the web.

I'm a big fan of aggregators of this type. While I subscribe to many resources already via RSS, launch pages inform me about new resources I hadn't heard of before. It also gives me the option of not subscribing to every single resource, when some of them only really interest me occasionally.

Note that iMTG is heavily biased toward Spanish-language content, by dint of being organized out of Spain. Nonetheless, deck lists and many other bits of Magic data are typically universal - and hey, shouldn't you know how to speak Spanish anyway? Sure you should.

There's a similar German-language launch page called MTG Pop. I imagine, given the game's popularity there, that there's also something like this in Japanese, but I'm seriously no good in searching in Japanese. In contrast, I can point you toward the information site for Korean PTQs.

The pattern here being that I can read Spanish, German, and Korean, but not Japanese. So there you go.

I'm excited about the Spanish-language Magic community, as I've only recently begun exploring it. iMTG should be a good starting point for any of you who are interested in delving into Spanish Magic.

In testing for the upcoming PTQ here in San Jose, I've been using this gal:

It's awesome, by the way. It also reminded me of the same feeling I had when I was running this lady at the Superstars Standard $1K:

Specifically, exalted is a brilliant keyword. Why is that?

In his recent article Rethinking Investment Theory: Everything Has Haste, Zac Hill discussed the way in which Sorceries and Instants beat out the random beater, by dint of having an immediate effect - effectively, "they have haste." Thus the title. I tend to agree with Zac's concept that a straight-up, wait-a-turn investment in a creature is kind of disappointing. This is why I tend to prefer creatures that have comes-into-play effects or have some other potential immediate value (e.g. Eternal Witness and Sakura-Tribe Elder, respectively).

Exalted is, much of the time, an immediate ROI, regardless of what else is going on with the creature in question. In the case of Battlegrace Angel, the immediate value is twofold, as by buying into the 4/4 flyer for next turn, you also get +1/+1 and lifelink for whatever you had in play this turn. This was brilliant much of the time in Standard (and has me, tangentially, thinking about playing Battlegraces as finishers in Extended).

In the more subtle case of my testing with Noble Hierarch, I found that the presence of the exalted keyword changed all my late-game Hierarchs from terrible draws (cf Birds of Paradise) into value draws. Now instead of a mana developer that you no longer need, you have something that reads "G: Give a solitary attacker +1/+1." Clearly you wouldn't play that on its own, but it means you suddenly have a topdeck that can do all sorts of things - like, for example, winning a Tarmogoyf war.

Over on Five with Flores, Michael J referred to his old article The Breakdown of Theory, which discusses the three-phase model of a Magic game. The phases are, briefly:

Phase 1: Manascrew (aka mana development)
Phase 2: Interactive play
Phase 3: Noninteractive play

Cards that get you out of phase 1 traditionally suck when you draw them post-phase 1. The presence of the exalted keyword converts Hierarch from a phase-1-only card to a card that has some value in all phases of the game.

So that's why I'm so high on exalted right now. All in one concise little package, it solves the dual problems of delayed ROI from a creature and of mana smoothing being a poor late-game topdeck. That's impressive for one little keyword.

In a pair of pieces on the main site today, Wizards announced that they're changing how they handle the core set. You can read the piece-by-piece breakdown here and Aaron Forsythe's article about it here. Here are the big changes:

• The sets will now be named by year - for example, the next core set will be "2010," rather than "11th Edition."
• Starting with the 2010 set, which releases this year, core sets will release annually each July, rather than bi-annually.
• About half of the cards in the set will be new.
• Core sets will be legal until October of the year following their release, meaning they'll be legal for about 15 months (and there will be 3-month overlaps between core sets).

Aaron explains the reasoning well in his article, and I agree with him across the board. Let's quote him a bit here:

Our core sets are typically the best way to teach and show off the world of Magic: The Gathering to the uninitiated, and to that end I believe they need to be as resonant and flavorful as they can be first and foremost. The core set should play into most people's preconceived notions of fantastic creatures and spells, and those notions should guide them to understand the goals and mechanics of the game.

In the beginning, Magic relied heavily on this kind of flavor. Rock Hydra, Vesuvan Doppelganger, and Fireball are all considered complicated cards from a pure rules standpoint, yet each of those was beloved by players just getting into the game because of how they "felt." Most fantasy fans have had experiences of one sort or another involving a hydra, a shapeshifter, or a fireball, and to see those concepts spring to life in a card game where they were in command—WOW!

That's exactly my memory of things from 1993-1994, when I first picked up the game. You want the core set to be full of cool things that appeal to a more general sense of fantasy.

Do take a look at Aaron's article, since he previews some new 2010 cards (and hey, Serra Angel is back to being an uncommon).

Also, the five planeswalkers from Lorwyn are going to be in the 2010 set. Coolness.

..and a final word from Aaron:

There has been some speculation as to which set of existing dual lands will be in the next core set, and the answer may surprise: none of them. We wanted to make a cycle of powerful dual lands that risk-averse newer players would like, which meant coming up with something that didn't involve losing life. Sorry, painlands, fetchlands, and Ravnica duals. Trust me, the new ones are awesome!

I actually found out about this one from a Google ad on my own site:

Superstars Game Center is having a $5K Standard tournament. Click here for their information page.

The $5K is structured as a two-stage event, with three different feeder tournaments qualifying you for the top 32 single-elimination tournament where the prizes happen. The whole thing looks like this:

Up to 6 people will qualify from a 64-person flight on Friday, March 13th.
Up to 20 people will qualify from the 200-person main flight on Saturday, March 14th.
Up to 6 people will qualify from the 64-person flight on Saturday afternoon.

Prizes minimally go down to 16th place; if the tournament sells out, Superstars will give prizes to everyone in the top 32.

The entry fee is $30.

There will be the usual extensive side events that you're used to from PTQs and other big events at Superstars, with normal and high-roller drafts.

Once again, click here to learn more, including helpful travel information if you're coming from outside the area (including flying in!).

The first PTQ Honolulu of the Bay Area is this Saturday at Superstars Game Center (click there, or click here for our TO's page).

I'm bringing a Gifts deck, which explains my recent Gifts Ungiven retrospective.

Although it's my policy to not post my deck list until I take it to at least the first relevant event of the season, here are some of the observations that came up in testing:

Hierarchs are out

Even though Noble Hierarch is an excellent example of the exalted keyword, it doesn't suit a control-oriented Gifts deck of the type I'm using.

Glittering Wish is still too slow

Although it makes me sad, Glittering Wish isn't fast enough, either on its own or as part of a Gifts package. Around the time of PT Berlin, Pat Chapin said the Gifts engine isn't powerful enough without a wish component, but in my testing to date, having the Wishes in the deck really weakens me.

This makes me sad, because conceptually, wishboards are awesome.

Shadowmoor gave Gifts some good tools

Even when you're not wishing for hybrid cards (another cool feature of Shadowmoor vis-a-vis some Gifts decks), Shadowmoor and Eventide gave some great functional addenda to various Gifts packages. Consider, for example, the value of having Selkie Hedge-Mage as part of an anti-aggro Gifts split.

Three for me

Some Gifts decks run three copies of the eponymous cards, some run four. In my experience so far, four is one too many most of the time, as although I do want to see a Gifts by turn four or five, seeing one in my opening hand is unnecessary, and seeing two makes me a seriously sad panda.

That's all for now. I'll have more to say post-tournament.

I know I have some new (often Magic-related) traffic coming in here these days, so I wanted to highlight some of the video offerings I have available over on YouTube, for all you newcomers. My game-related YouTube account is right here. Sample videos include:

Luis Scott-Vargas taking down his first GP win

2008 Player of the Year Shuheii Nakamura playing at PT Hollywood

Hall of Famer Zvi Mowshowitz playing at PT Hollywood

My video offerings are irregular, since they come up whenever I happen to be near a premier event, but I do encourage you to look through them, since they include video match coverage you won't see anywhere else.

I was thinking of talking about the SCG Richmond $5K, but our man Michael J covered enough of it in his column on the mothership, so I'll leave it alone.

Instead, let's take a look at the most recent batch of PTQ top eights as we pitch into the next PTQ weekend (where I'll be playing, and for which I'm still trying to pin down my exact final strategy).

The first standout observation of this batch of top eights is that wins went to double Affinity, double Faeries, and one copy of Zoo. Looking past the blue envelope in this set of top eights shows us that Zoo continues to be strong, albeit largely in WRG rather than Domain variants, and that Faeries decks are starting to pack single copies of Meloku as a possible finisher. The third part of our stock triad - combo - remains a strong contender, with Storm and Elves decks finishing in multiple top eights as well (although with some clustering, suggesting certain environments are more prone to hating out the appropriate combos than others). The strong outlier choice is Bant Aggro, with a number of finishers in a couple of the top eights.

What's the take home message? Nothing super exciting. Be prepared to face down mono-blue control, Storm combo, Elves combo, and Zoo, with a side order of Gaddock Teeg there just to screw you up, courtesy of Bant.

Click to the extended for comments and links to the most recent round of top eights.

Following several discussions about how to get into Magic over on BoardGameGeek.com, I put together a post about how I buy Magic cards on the secondary market.

You can click here to read the post and follow-up discussion at BoardGameGeek, or you can click through to the extended entry here to read the guidelines I posted.

Luis Scott-Vargas has been on quite a run, with two GP wins and a Pro Tour win in the last few months, in addition to a standout performance at Worlds. This weekend, he's had a crushing performance at Pro Tour Kyoto 2009, with an 11-game undefeated streak before Matteo Orsini-Jones finally took him down in round twelve.

The day before the PT started, Rich Hagon channeled James Lipton and did this nice little interview with Luis:

Luis looks to be playing in the top eight tomorrow while our area PTQ - which he'd be helping judge any other day - will be nearing its own top eight.

I just watched Gab Nassif's spectacular topdeck to win his way out of the quarterfinals in Kyoto.

I'm reminded of earlier today, when one of my opponents commented that I was topdecking like a champ. I said that I'd put the cards there in the first place because I wanted to draw them...

I did not do particularly well at today's PTQ, but I stayed in to try and suss out the issues with my deck choice. Across sixteen games, I mulliganed to six five times, and to five fours times, which suggest to me that there are basic structural issues here.

Click through to the extended for a deck list and a brief tournament report.