Land (24)
Instant (18)
- 1x Blessed Alliance
- 1x Condescend
- 2x Fatal Push
- 4x Gifts Ungiven
- 1x Logic Knot
- 3x Mana Leak
- 2x Murderous Cut
- 1x Negate
- 1x Path to Exile
- 2x Spell Snare
Planeswalker (1)
Sideboard
Maybeboard
Creature (4)
Instant (4)
Sorcery (3)
An Esper control deck built around Gifts Ungiven. For those unfamiliar with the combo, at the end of your opponent's turn, you cast Gifts and choose to find only two cards, namely Unburial Rites and one of Iona, Shield of Emeria
or Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite, so your opponent has to put both into your graveyard. Then you flash back Rites and reanimate whichever big creature you found. The rest of the deck is designed to play control until you can find and cast Gifts.
The strengths of the deck are that you get to play both combo and control, packing a lot of disruption for your opponent's plan while also having the option to just win the game on the spot. Its main weakness is that the Gifts package takes up a fair number of spots in the deck, and that if you draw Rites or any of the creature targets, they're usually dead cards. It's susceptible to graveyard hate as well, but it's still a decent control deck with some live win conditions even if the Gifts combo gets shut down.
Mana Base
There is one Tectonic Edge to deal with Tron decks and opposing manlands and make Mana Leak useful a little later into the game, and a singleton Creeping Tar Pit as an alternate win condition. Vault of the Archangel plays very well with Lingering Souls tokens. Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth allows tapping fetches directly for mana, and there is a Steam Vents floating around to provide red mana after sideboarding.
Creatures
Elesh Norn and Iona tend to end games against creature decks and combo decks respectively. One of the two should usually come out after game one. Griselbrand and Ashen Rider are sideboard options to replace whichever isn't particularly helpful.
Snapcaster Mage is here because there are a lot of spells to flashback and it is just a really good card in general. It might be worth adding a second one. Spellskite is here because it's so useful against so many decks, including the burn decks that give this deck such a headache. It's possible that it should be a sideboard card, though it's also possible that it should stay in the main and there should be a second in the side.
Tasigur, the Golden Fang is a great card in theory, as a good blocker with significant upside, but his ability has some unfortunate interactions with the reanimation plan, though. His ability seems to always result in putting a massively expensive creature back into my hand.
Planeswalkers
Liliana of the Veil is pretty great in general; she can take over games if left unchecked, and she provides a way to discard inadvertently drawn big creatures. Jace, Architect of Thought is an excellent source of card advantage who also happens to slow aggressive decks, and he incidentally stops the Splinter Twin and Deceiver Exarch combo. Gideon Jura can be a little slow, but unlike the other walkers, he's actually a win condition, and in the worst-case scenario he's usually at least a removal spell.
Removal
There are a lot of singletons here because of Gifts; sometimes you need to use it to get two removal spells instead of going for the reanimation combo. Path to Exile is probably the best removal spell, but it's limited to a single copy because too many tend to make Mana Leak bad. It's possible that the Leaks should be Remands instead for that reason, but this deck can be a bit grindy, so delaying a problem spell until the next turn isn't always good enough. Murderous Cut is a close second to Path, but again is limited because of delve. Dismember is a popular card that deals with most things, but this deck frequently has issues with its life total in the same matchups where it wants to be casting removal spells, so again I think one is the right number. Victim of Night doesn't have the option of being a one-mana spell in an emergency, but it does pretty well most of the time. Doom Blade is usually cheap enough and flexible enough, though perhaps Slaughter Pact is better. Oust and Condemn don't solve all problems, but they are cheap and effective in matchups in which the problem creatures are going to be attacking. Go for the Throat is often played over Doom Blade/Slaughter Pact, but Affinity sees a fair amount of play, and Go for the Throat is totally dead in that matchup, while Doom Blade can almost always find something to hit.
There are three different board wipe effects because of Gifts; sometimes, Elesh Norn won't do it or is in your hand already, and you just need to make all the things die. Damnation is probably (OK, definitely) worth playing, but Day of Judgment is in my budget right now and the other isn't, so that's where we are for now. The practical difference between the two is pretty minimal.
Miscellaneous
We have some discard and countermagic to preemptively deal with problem cards. Timely Reinforcements is an amazing card against aggressive decks, and basically the only way this deck ever wins a game against Burn. I go back and forth about how whether there should be three copies or four in the 75, and whether one should go in the main. Lingering Souls is usually just a repeated fog effect, but unanswered it can also just win the game pretty quickly, especially with multiple copies.
Sphinx's Revelation is a super-powerful card, but it's really a five-drop for practical purposes, since you don't want to be casting it for less than that. It's a singleton for that reason. There are four copies of Gifts because that usually wins the game for four mana.
Cryptic Command is obviously very good, but it's a very expensive card, and it's tough to cast. It's possible that there should be one here, but probably no more than that.
Sideboarding
The deck seems to have mostly pretty good matchups against most common decks in the current metagame. It runs a lot of removal and counters, which works well against almost everything, since even most combo decks in modern are creature-based. Burn is an exception, since it's just SO fast, but Timely Reinforcements is amazing in that matchup, so a few copies of that go a long way. Iona naming red also basically ends the game, so all we need to do is get to that point.
The sideboard contains two reasons for the red mana source in the main. The first is Slaughter Games, which is an uncounterable game-ender against a lot of combo decks, such as Scapeshift, Storm, and Living End, and it gets rid of the Hive Mind win condition that Bloom Titan decks run, which is also a huge problem if it resolves.
(I originally wanted to include Slaughter Games to deal with Splinter Twin decks, but those decks seem to have an impossible time landing their combo against a deck as heavy in removal and countermagic as this one, so I don't think it's actually worth bringing in for that matchup. When this deck loses to Twin, it's because they've played like a Delver deck, beating down with Vendilion Clique or Tasigur, the Golden Fang or Young Pyromancer tokens and finishing with burn spells. The answer to that matchup seems to be to actually treat it like a Delver deck and just bring in removal and counterspells.)
Keranos, God of Storms is an additional finisher. He's nearly impossible to get rid of, and he's great at grinding games out, especially against control decks that may have removal spells to kill Iona or Griselbrand. He's also, unlike the planeswalkers in here that also serve as win conditions, a reanimation target.
The rest of the sideboard cards are pretty normal. A couple of extra removal spells for aggro decks, a Negate and an extra Mana Leak for combo and control decks, a Disenchant for Affinity and to get rid of Blood Moon, and Pithing Needle for a variety of potential problems. Leyline of the Void is the solution for graveyard decks; sadly, we can't use Rest in Peace in a Gifts deck. There aren't a ton of graveyard decks running around right now, though, so it's possible that these aren't necessary at the moment.
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| Date added | 10 years |
| Last updated | 7 years |
| Legality | This deck is Modern legal. |
| Rarity (main - side) | 3 - 1 Mythic Rares 24 - 4 Rares 16 - 4 Uncommons 11 - 2 Commons |
| Cards | 60 |
| Avg. CMC | 2.64 |
| Tokens | Emblem Elspeth, Sun's Champion, Soldier 1/1 W, Spirit 1/1 W |
| Folders | Modern--Old |
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