Front page, below the fold

Thursday’s Daily Deck List at the mothership is the Nayamorphic build that I’ve been talking about over at ChannelFireball.com. If you’d like to learn how the deck came to be, click here, and if you want some advice on building a sideboard to go with it, click here
I’m looking forward to seeing how much uptake this generates (if any). It’s neat, at any rate.

The Dread Return of Iona

Very randomly I tried out a bit of Vintage today, using the following Dredge list:
Iona Dredge

21 Creatures:
Flame-Kin Zealot
Stinkweed Imp
Iona, Shield of Emeria
Golgari Thug
Golgari Grave-Troll
Narcomoeba
Ichorid
28 Spells:
Dread Return
Bridge from Below
Leyline of the Void
Cabal Therapy
Serum Powder
Darkblast
Unmask
Chalice of the Void
11 Land:
Petrified Field
Bazaar of Baghdad
City of Brass
15 Sideboard:
Gemstone Mine
Chain of Vapor
Contagion
Emerald Charm
Ancient Grudge
Ingot Chewer

I simply hijacked a recent Dredge list from DeckCheck and swapped in Iona for the Angel of Despair slot.
It turns out, Iona is hilarious in this deck, and is basically an auto-win if you can Dread Return her into play (hint: name “blue”). I don’t have much more to say than that. Once again, I wish there were more effective reanimation in Standard.
Edit: I auto-lost to a Platinum Angel out of a Tendrils deck and suddenly remembered why Angel of Despair was in the deck. So I yanked the Darkblast and now the deck runs Iona and Despair.

Bring on the Red Team

My latest In Development, Red Teaming, is up at ChannelFireball.com. This week, I discuss how to give a deck concept a shakedown cruise, and settle in on one control and one aggro build.
Outside of the column, work has been eating my brain a bit in the past couple weeks. Thus the lack of Gifts Ungiven posts. There should be some in the coming days, as even though I’m on a business trip, I finally have some time to do a little more additional thinking about formats new and old, so there may be actual posts.