Gifts Ungiven

Remember when I reviewed how Gifts Ungiven was used through multiple Extended seasons? This week, I'm pitching the wisdom of doing that kind of review generally as we head into the new Extended PTQ season for San Juan.

In Building Your Extended Reference Library I've put together not only that pitch, but also a whole bunch of links to prior seasons and worked examples of what useful things we can learn from them.

Enjoy.

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.

It's proselytizing time at In Development, with this week's column titled You Should Play in a PTQ. Click on over to hear my pitch for PTQs as a darn good time, first and foremost.

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.