Gifts Ungiven

After having fun playing around with Vintage Dredge, I've spent much of the past week nonproductively attempting to revive (ahem) Dredge in the current Extended.

Unfortunately, the loss of Odyssey block has severely impinged on the power of Dredge, as you lose easy access to cards meant to ditch stuff into your graveyard and operate easily out of your graveyard. The loss of Cabal Therapy, for example, is pretty nasty.

After significant tinkering, I came up with a list that is, at the very least, fun to goldfish with. It's still not solid enough that I'd want to take it out for a tournament spin, but I have nonetheless decided it's worth posting.

Click through to the extended entry for the deck list and some brief remarks.

I'm almost certainly going to be playing a Gifts deck in the current PTQ San Juan Extended season, but in thinking about other possible archetypes, I've spent some time thinking about Extended porting of either the Team America Legacy deck or the old Standard TarmoRack deck.

I'm not sure if this deck can actually work out against the current Extended metagame, but I've gone through several iterations on it and included the most likely one to date in the extended entry.

Click through for deck list and commentary.

JWay made it to 16th place in the most recent MTGO PTQ with a Valakut deck that caught my eye by dint of having no copies of Scapeshift.

Click through to the extended entry for the deck list.

Yesterday, Jonathon Loucks detailed a novel approach to making a Gifts Ungiven deck by deciding on the Gifts packages first, and then assembling the deck around it.

This week's In Development, cleverly titled Wishing for Gifts, takes a look at my favorite deck, Gifts Ungiven, and the possibilities we can find in a Gifts Ungiven deck with Glittering Wish giving us access to a wishboard.

Have you seen this Worldwake preview card?

Although I don't think this will end up being super amazing in practice, I found myself suddenly struck by the idea of a Tooth and Nail deck featuring quadruple Lotus Cobra and quadruple Omnath for true mana-building shenanigans.

I suppose if we had a Lotus Cobra on turn two, and (magically) no one killed our dudes, we could see the following:

Turn 3: Play fetchland (G), break fetchland (GG), cast Omnath, tap remaining two lands for net (GG) in pool

Turn 4: Play fetchland (GGG), break fetchland (GGGG), tap all lands (GGGGGGGG)...and be sadly one mana short of Tooth and Nail.

Clearly, it needs more work. :) Still, maybe someone can combine these cards to do something actually useful in a Standard or Block deck.

Check out the top eight decks from last weekend's PTQ in San Antonio.

Although the invite was taken down by Andres Suares with Domain Zoo featuring Bant Charm, which is a pretty good call, my eye was caught by the second place deck. Ryan Benito nearly made it there with a U/W Touch-Blink deck featuring Reveillark and Martyr of Sands. It's been a while since there was a last-minute wave of Touch-Blink decks in Standard, so you might want to click through and review those cards and what they do. I'm just fascinated to see such a divergent deck choice make it up to the finals of a PTQ.

In fact, this is a pretty interesting top eight. We have:

1) Andres Suares with Bant Charm Domain Zoo (aka "Charmed Zoo")
2) Ryan Benito with TBML
3) Chet Steinhagen with Scapeshift
4) James Wise with Jund Dudes
5) Sang Jung with Rubin Zoo
6) Drew Dumanski with BB Naya (where BB is Bloodbraid and Boom // Bust)
7) Hal Brady with Dark Depths
8) Andrew Jones with Affinity

This kind of top eight makes me happy about Extended all over again.

This week's In Development is up, and it's all about my Johnny-tastic time at last weekend's PTQ. Click on over to read about how I ended up losing a tournament but winning at life with the help of a 10/10, a 1/1, and a funky enchantment.

...and we might imagined something borrowed from a friend's account, and a few blue cards as well. I was checking in on the most recent Extended PTQ online earlier this week, and was pleasantly surprised to see a mix of expected and novel builds in the top eight.

You can check out the top eight and quite a few more decks here. You can also go ahead and click on through to the Extended entry for all the lists in the top eight with some commentary from me.

Want some Extended tips? Want to see some Pro Tour photojournalism? Check out this week's In Development, where I talk about taking on both of the PTQs held last weekend at San Diego, as well as include some pics and a link to my full, two hundred picture photoessay covering the Pro Tour experience.