MTG Salvation

Well, another pro tour come and gone, this time with a shiny new banned list to go with it. I've held back from making too many claims until after the pro tour, but now it's time for me to cut loose. I'm not going to waste time with preamble, so let's jump right in. 

My initial predictions for Modern after the banned list, though I never formalized them into one post, were largely as follows: 

Bitterblossom was not going to make waves. I've been saying this for a while, and I was saying it after the pro tour. Bitterblossom was underwhelming in modern every time I tested it. It's a good card, but in a world where Abrupt Decay is legal and the format carries as wide an assortment of threats as Modern does, you don't want to be the guy endstepping Mistbind Clique. I thought it would absolutely not make top 8, but maybe someone would call the metagame right with it and have a few people make day 2. Nothing particularly good. 

Wild Nacatl would be quite strong, but the metagame would adapt, people would be ready with hate, and it would prove to be perfectly fair in the format. It would be strong, people would play it, it wouldn't be the end of the world. 

Jund would lose out a lot. I'm gonna say this very clearly: I don't think Jund is dead. Far from it. However, it's now less consistent. I predicted the death of 4-color (since the manabase just doesn't support it), but that Jund itself would do fine. Not great, but fine. 

Graveyard decks would see a resurgence. Note, I don't mean graveyard-based combo like Goryo's Vengeance reanimator, I mean decks that use the graveyard as a major resource. Graveyard-based combo just isn't competitive if it can't fight through much harder graveyeard hate than Deathrite Shaman, so I didn't expect a huge upswing. The decks that really got hurt by it were decks that used the graveyard as their advantage engine. Traditionally, these decks (like Loam, say) have been able to use more vulnerable graveyard interactions because opponents wouldn't want to board in dedicated graveyard hate just to deal with your advantage engine. They'd be wasting a card, and still have to deal with the rest of your deck. Deathrite, however, by providing targeted graveyard hate while generating tempo and reach in various forms, made that strategy untenable. As a result, I predicted more Knight of the Reliquary, more Life from the Loam, more Pyromancer Ascension, and more Gifts Ungiven. 

 

How did I do? Let's see: 

I was right on in my assessment of Bitterblossom. All the pros dropped it pretty quickly, and while it did decently for itself, it did not make top 8 and did not finish in the money. 

I was pretty close in my assessment of Wild Nacatl. I called that it would underperform relative to the doomsayers, but underestimated how much it would. I expected it to make top 8. I also expected the best version to play a bit of blue, which was way off the mark. I attribute this to the lack of combo compared to what I thought (I expected there to be a minor combofest day 1 as everyone started playing graveyard-based combo again), the fact that I wasn't in the know about Anger of the Gods until only a couple days before the pro tour, and the fact that Blue Moon came out of nowhere. Incidentally, whoever made that deck deserves a metal. Not a fancy metal, but a metal nonetheless. To that person: thank you for showing everyone that Modern is still FAR from solved. 

I was right on in my assessment of Jund, I'd say. I think it underperformed a bit more than I expected overall, and overperformed in some cases. This suggests to me that the deck is still strong, but most of the good players abandoned it, leaving the idiots and a few people who figured out where to go after losing Deathrite. Those last few people did great (because people thought Jund was dead and didn't prepare enough), and the idiots did poorly. 

Finally, I was pretty far off in my assessment of graveyard decks. There was little to no Loam in the format, I didn't see much in the way of Gifts, and Knight of the Reliquary, which I thought was a big winner from the bans, was nowhere to be seen. Incidentally, I don't think the zoo players were right to not include Knight in their lists. These 1-drop-heavy zoo builds are very fast, and probably have the fastest goldfish, but they're vulnerable to Anger of the Gods and they still lack some staying power. I do like the Boros Charm/Ghor-clan Rampager combo they played, that was inspired, but Knight gives a lot of staying power, he can get huge, and you should never underestimate the power of a land toolbox. I think as the format matures, Knight will become a better and better choice. But who am I to say? I'm not much of an aggro player. 

The other big story, and this is one I sorta called, was the resurgence of Storm. Now, I dislike storm in modern personally, though I certainly respect it as a deck choice. I just dislike these all-cantrip, mostly all-goldfish styles of decks. When you contrast it with, say, ANT in Legacy or TPS in Vintage (which was my favorite deck after Meandeck Gifts back in the day), which pack a lot of disruption and have tons of interaction at all times, and have tutors to back it up, there's just no comparison for me. I won't disparage storm players, and I know the deck is strong, I just don't love that that's what storm looks like today. That said, it delivered a command performance at the pro tour, fulfilling my prediction of more Graveyard decks (ironically, it was really a Graveyard-based combo, given how much Ascension and Past in Flames rely on the graveyard). That actually worries me some, since it means Wizard's burning hatred for storm as a deck means this may warrant another banning, and that Seething Song is less likely to come off the Banned List, which in turn makes my favorite Modern deck (URw Ritual Gifts) a lot less viable. 

So what won? Well, URW won out in a major way, taking the tournament and proving to be a very powerful strategy (I actually think it's better than Pod right now). Blue Moon emerged out of nowhere and is awesome. Amulet Combo delivered its first strong performance, and I look forward to seeing more of it. Twin won too, but it's unclear what version is going to be best going forward. 

What lost? Tron. Oh, tron. I've hated R/G tron since it was created, and finally it's dying. UW tron still doesn't look that good right now, unfortunately, but I can live with that. Faeries is still not a good deck choice. Jund lost a fair amount, but it's still kicking and probably always will be. 

 

Finally, it's time for me to discuss my thoughts on the banned list overall. First off, I should preface this by saying that I like the way the banned list is right now, and though it could see some improvement, I don't think it's backbreaking. The format is in a good place at the moment, and I'd be wary of disrupting that. 

That said, there are some shameful issues here. 

First, Golgari Grave-Troll doesn't deserve its place and needs to be unbanned as soon as possible. It's embarassing, having it there. If you look at their original reasoning for banning Grave-troll, it's as follows: "The real power of Dredge is that every card draw that is replaced by dredging five or six cards effectively allows the Dredge player to draw two or three cards. By that metric, Golgari Grave-Troll is the strongest "card-drawing spell" in the Dredge deck, and it doubles as a win condition. Therefore, it seemed like the best place to attack the deck. You can still play Dredge, but you'll be dredging a little bit slower, and you'll have to play real targets to reanimate instead of getting Golgari Grave-Troll for free." First off, any time dredge was reanimating Grave-Troll, they were probably not winning. Second, you can't play dredge today, because a couple months later they banned Dread Return, on the grounds it broke the turn-3 rule. Not only is that logic incorrect (Dredge never broke the turn-3 rule, and indeed was quite slow at the time), but it also renders banning Grave-Troll moot, since dredge is now dead. But what about other graveyard decks? Isn't Grave-Troll a great enabler for those, too? Well, no, it's not. Grave-Troll demands that you have a way to get it into your graveyard repeatedly, and to keep drawing cards. Additionally, since every time you dredge it you're drawing a 5-drop and you can't play any lands from your Graveyard in modern, either you're doing this around turn 4-5 so you can get lands out and develop a board first (in which case what's the problem, it doesn't break the turn-3 rule and anyone who can't deal with a graveyard deck that starts rolling turn 4-5 shouldn't be playing modern in the first place), or you're doing it without developing the board. That means that your entire strategy has to operate out of the graveyard, and the only strategy that does that in modern is Dredge. In short, Grave-Troll is banned because it enables a deck that's pretty much unplayable in Modern. 

The only other card I'm really thinking about for unbanning right now is Seething Song. Admittedly, that's for personal reasons. While I have done a certain level of analysis that suggested that, while Storm may have broken the turn-3 rule before the ban, it certainly didn't do so as consistently as certain other decks (mainly Affinity and Infect), neither of which had anything banned. This suggests to me that Song wasn't banned because wizards wanted storm to not violate the turn-3 rule, they did it because they didn't like storm. Now, there are valid reasons for wizards not to like storm. But that doesn't change the fact that Seething Song didn't really deserve the ban. 

Why should it be unbanned, then? Storm had a good showing at the pro tour, do we really want to buff it now? Well, I don't think Seething Song would make storm particularly dominant, and even if it did a lot of decks in the format are equipped to deal with storm (UWR and Twin can both adapt to it easily, as could Blue Moon, and Zoo might even be able to race it). But also I want it unbanned because it enabled other decks, most notably Hive Mind and Ritual Gifts. Am I biased in this? Totally. But I still think I'm right. 

 

All right, I've pointlessly rambled long enough. Thanks for reading, 

LK

Well, it's official. With the coming of Dragon's Maze and the printing of Plasm Capture, modern is officially a format with Mana Drain. Make no mistake, this is a big deal. If this card is half as strong as my initial testing says it is, this could well change Modern forever. Am I exaggerating? Let's take a look.

The first thing you notice about Plasm Capture is the cost. It costs GGUU, which basically limits it to decks playing UG, not just splashing one of the colors. That means that, if we want it in Ritual Gifts, and we obviously do, we have to move into RUG in a major way. That means saying goodbye to the Unburial Rites/Griselbrand package, Martial Coup, Mystical Teachings backup plans, and probably the storage lands. This isn't all bad, though: We now get access to Ancient Grudge, a card I've long coveted of the R/G players for it's ability to single-handedly turn the affinity matchup around. That's often been a difficult matchup in the past, due to the amount of counters and relative speeds of the decks, but now, with an answer that powerful lurking in the sideboard, we can easily address that issue without having to blow Scrolls on Hurkyl's Recall. We also get access to other sideboard options, especially transformative ones, such as Tarmogoyfs and Quirion Dryads, and a lot more tricks. The other thing about this is that it's a 4-drop counterspell with 2 colored mana symbols outside our base color. That both means that we can't play the full 4 (too many 4-drops), though that isn't really a problem with Merchant Scroll, and that shift the deck to a more controlling position. We've lost Seething Song, a crucial card to helping us go off, and gained Plasm Capture, a card that both provides a powerful disruptive answer and an incredibly strong ritual that can only come out in the late game. It means our game must be less shaped around assembling the critical cards so much as using Plasm Capture and Gifts Ungiven to start a multi-turn engine that culminates in our victory. By that I mean, they tap out for a 3 or a 4, you Plasm Capture it, untap, and either go off with the extra mana, or use it to cast a free Gifts for more draw and answers, putting yourself in a dominant game state.

Now, let's talk about the really good part of Plasm Capture: The text box. What does this card do for us? Well, aside from making any and all tron matchups go from unfavorable to a bye (go ahead, cast that 7-drop, I dare ya, I double dare ya motherf-), it gives us an entirely new dimension. As a hard counter, it provides us an unequivocal answer to topdecks in the late game, something we've lacked without a good hard counter in the format (except Cryptic Command, but Cryptic was never great in this deck anyway). As a Mana Drain, it gives us the ability to punish players who tap out with a greater degree of success than ever before. Sure, we'll probably be mostly catching 2's and sometimes 3's, but even then, the card nets us +2 or +3 mana on the next turn, giving us the ability to cast a draw spell with counter backup much earlier, go off much more easily, draw cards and wrath on the same turn, anything. Make no mistake: if you resolve this against anything costing 3 or more, and you lose, it's almost certainly because you messed up.

Enough talking. List time.



I feel quite safe in saying that this is the strongest deck I've ever played in Modern. Using this deck, it actually feels as if you're playing a different format, like a slower Vintage. And your opponents didn't get the memo and brought their standard decks to the match. Make no mistake, the limits on this deck are no longer the card quality or playability: now, it's about whether or not people decide to try it.
Thanks for reading,
LK

I started this way back in march, and never finished it. It's worth reading, I think, but it's also a bit outdated.

There's nothing like taking time to play a game with a different skill set to crystallize your thoughts on magic. I just got back from playing what is possibly the most difficult e-sport in the world: starcraft 2. While you should keep in mind that I'm not a professional player at that game, I do feel comfortable saying it's different from magic, and especially from magic in the way of ritual gifts, in a few different ways.

How so? Well, Starcraft is a real-time game, unlike magic. That means that you have to make many more decisions in a much smaller time frame, each of which is critical to the overall shape of the game. That split second decision of whether you should lift your supply depot or not can expose you to a fatal zergling attack, or mean that you lose the ability to punish your opponent's agression. Fortunately, the number of different objects in the decisions (components, for those of you who like systems theory) is vastly smaller than in Magic (13,000 in Magic, maybe 100 in Starcraft), but enough to give an extraordinary degree of difficulty.

What does this have to do with Ritual Gifts? Well, in many ways, that environment is the opposite of what you'll find playing Ritual Gifts. With Ritual Gifts, it's all about planning ahead.

Simply put, Planning Ahead means that you need to go into every game knowing how you're gonna win it. This is crucial at every stage, from sideboarding to designing your bullets to choosing the right gifts pile. At every stage in the game, every decision you make should further that specific plan. That sounds pretty simple, but actually it gets quite difficult.

Here's an example: It's turn 3. You were on the play, going up against neo-Jund. A good matchup, I've found. They've just cast a Dark Confidant after Thoughtseizing your Gifts. Your hand is: Calciform Pools, Desolate Lighthouse, Burst of Speed, and Snapcaster Mage. You have in play: Calciform Pools, Island, and an Izzet Signet. You draw a Merchant Scroll. What do you do? The answer is really fairly simple: you can't let them get card advantage off the Bob, or you'll find yourself in a world of hurt, so you probably want to scroll up an Izzet Charm and kill the Bob, which also sets you up for a Snapcaster Mage next turn, netting you card advantage and allowing you to build into a new gifts. It plays into your overall plan of accruing card advantage, drawing your way through the disruption, and eventually Gifting into a huge win. But why is that your plan? It gets you the best win percentage against jund, sure, but why? What's different in that situation compared to, say, Tron, where in a similar situation you want to Scroll for a cryptic?

That brings me to the next critical concept to playing Ritual Gifts, and really magic in general: play to your strengths. I've mentioned this before, but it bears repeating. Simply put, every deck has certain strengths and weaknesses. Gifts will never be as good as attacking and the red zone as Delver or Zoo. However, with each game, certain aspects are more important than others, and one deck will be better at that aspect, and that deck will tend to win. You can use this to your advantage, by figuring out what you're better at doing than your opponent, and make your opponent about that. In other words, by playing to your strengths.

Take Jund. Jund's still a deck you can expect to see, so far as I can tell, so this will help you in the future. Jund is a good deck. It packs a lot of cheap disruption, and can back it up with both card advantage and big threats. What do you have that it doesn't? The answer is versatility. A lot of Jund's cards are just the best cards of a specific type. That means that some are backbreaking to you (Deathrite Shaman, Dark Confidant) if unanswered, and some are just weak (Huntmaster of the Fells, Lightning Bolt). That means that, since your cards all serve multiple purposes, you can run through their relevant cards and actually kill them by drawing more relevant cards. It's weird to think about, but that's the best way I can describe it. In other words, if you can take out their early threats that back up the disruption, you can fairly quickly draw your way back into the game and kill them before they can reestablish the disruption.

If that doesn't make sense, take twin. Twin is a good deck. It packs a lot of card selection, a very consistent infinite kill combo, and a lot of redundant parts to protect from disruption. What do you have that it doesn't? Card advantage. Most twin decks have no way to draw more cards, and if they do it's only a couple snapcasters or maybe a Compulsive Research. You're playing 4 Gifts, a Snapcaster, 4 Scrolls to get you more gifts, and the massive card advantage of a late-game Past in Flames. If you can set up a gifts for more draw spells, you can slowly run away with the game and get to a point where you have 7 cards in hand and they have 2.

What all this comes down to is: you need to have a plan, and you need to know how to execute it. Once you've formulated the plan, every decision you make should involve your thinking "how does this further my plan for this game? How does this move the game in the direction I want to take it?"

That's all for now.

Thanks for reading,
LK

Let's cut to the chase. Today, the DCI banned Seething Song. Does this cripple ritual gifts? yeah, probably. Can it exist without Seething Song? Yes, but it's complicated. Let's dive right in.

First off, here are my thoughts on the decision to ban Seething Song in the first place. Like most of you, I'm sure, I was blindsided by this decision, and strongly disagree with their reasoning. At first, I thought it was just because, well, it cripples a deck I play, but that isn't consistent to my reaction to prior bannings. I used to play Blue-based Cloudpost decks, and I was happy that they banned the post. After thinking about it for some time, I came to this critique of it: it doesn't fulfill the criteria for a banning.

Here are the generally accepted criteria used to ban a card.
1. Format dominance. Is it a primary component of a dominant deck or comprise part of a dominant tactic? Examples of this are Punishing Fire, Dark Depths, or Stoneforge Mystic.
2. Format speed. Does it lead to consistent kills that are faster than what wizards is comfortable with happening in that format? Examples of this are Glimpse of Nature, Ponder/Preordain, and Blazing Shoal.
3. Relative format power. Is it so powerful that even if not dominant now, it will eventually become dominant simply due to its raw power in a vacuum? Examples of this are Jace, the Mind Sculptor and Chrome Mox, though by nature your mileage may vary depending on what card is banned for this reason, based on what your personal experience has been.
4. Format enjoyment. Is it so annoying to play against that it is actually making people leave the format because they don't want to play it? This is pretty rare nowadays, as Wizards has gotten better at keeping prison cards and similar strategies in check (perhaps a bit too good, depending on whom you ask), but examples could be Mental Misstep, or Trinisphere in Vintage.

So, let's go through those for Seething Song.
1. In the B&R list update, the DCI stated that Storm was the best performing deck in online dailies (excepting Jund), and that this was part of the reason to ban a card from it. Let's pick that apart. Storm was NOT tier 1 in modern, and frankly, anyone who says otherwise is deluding themselves. If you want to separate it from tier 2 by giving it a name like "tier 1.5", then I'm right up with you. But Tier 1 means deck to beat, and I never found myself in a situation where I couldn't play a brew because it lost to storm. If anything, Twin was the more problematic U/R combo deck in my experience, as it had more staying power and versatility.

2. This was the DCI's main argument for the banning of Seething Song. They claimed that it led to "frequent" turn 3 kills. I have several issues with this logic. First, at no point has the DCI given a definition of "frequent". Does this mean a 20% goldfish rate? 40%? 50? Without a clear metric, the entire decision becomes subjective, based on gut feeling rather than on concrete notions of speed. However, even if we go by this standard, let's look at the decks. A quick perusal of the Modern metagame reveals 3 "problem" decks that could be described to be too-fast. They are as follows:
Storm
Infect
Affinity
Those are the high-ish tier decks that can be described as "frequently" getting turn 3 wins. Of those 3, I would order their frequency as follows:
Infect
Storm
Affinity
Why they chose to ban a storm card rather than an infect card is a mystery here. If I were to guess, I would say it's because it's hard to ban a critical card from Infect, since pump spells are pretty replacable, but that itself could be circumvented by, say, banning Blighted Agent or Glistener Elf and making it much more inconsistent. If you were to follow the DCI's logic, that would be a more prudent decision. Instead, however, they banned a card from Storm. Why? Again, I think it's probably easier to ban a card from Storm, but I also think it has to do with the overall direction wizards wants to take magic: towards a more creature-oriented game, with combat as the critical interaction. I have my own problems with this decision, which I'm sure I'll discuss eventually, but assuming it's properly executed I'm prepared to give the company that's done pretty well so far the benefit of the doubt. However, I think that here it's getting in the way of fair format development. Infect is, if anything, a less interactive deck than a properly built storm deck. Assuming that this was part of their logic, they're doing the format a disservice by letting the less interactive deck survive just because it has cards with numbers on the bottom right rather than blank space.

3. This really has nothing to do with Seething Song. Everyone knows it. Let's move on.

4. Format enjoyment. Here's where I think part of the reason to ban a storm card is. Simply put, there are a lot of people who don't like playing against storm. I'm not sure why, since I find the adrenaline rush on both sides to be pretty enjoyable, but they do. However, these storm decks today aren't TEPS or Long. They're deprived of a lot of the broken mana and engines (no Dark Ritual, no Mind's Desire), and exist in a format with many more options when it comes to hate cards. If anything, I've found the existence of Storm to be a good thing in the format. It's not particularly dominant, you don't run into it often enough to feel discouraged by it, and the very fact that it's viable brings in the "storm players".

Now, I appear to be out of time and space to discuss the effect on Ritual Gifts (possibly because I don't have an editor for these little articles of mine), but have no fear. Now is not the time for fear. That comes later. Perhaps tomorrow.

Thanks for reading,
LegitKarona

Hello, all. In my last few pieces, I analyzed how to build Ritual Gifts, from the core to the sideboard. Now it's time to turn actually playing Ritual Gifts. I'll start with the most basic skill you'll need: winning.

First, here's my latest list:

I finally made room for the Empty the Warrens kill, which as you can see changed the deck quite a bit. More on my choices another time. Now let's talk about winning.

First off, here are the conditions you'll need to win. There are a few possibilities:
3 lands in play, 2 rituals, a manamorphose, a land, and a Gifts Ungiven in hand.
4 lands in play, a ritual, a manamorphose, and a Gifts Ungiven in hand.
5 lands in play, a Gifts Ungiven, and some extra boost, a ritual, a land, a Manamorphose, a Past in Flames, any of the above, in hand.
6 lands in play and a Gifts Ungiven, though it'll help to have a Manamorphose.
That's it. It may sound like a lot, but it's really not. It may also sound like Manamorphose is incredibly important, but if you've been able to charge a storage land, that will help too. Keep in mind that all these have to be true on the end step of the turn BEFORE you go off.

How does that work? Simple. Let's take the first one. At the end of your turn, play a ritual, and use that mana and your third land to cast Gifts Ungiven. Assume it resolves. Search for:

Say they give you the two rituals. from there, you untap, play a land, play your first ritual, the two ones you got with gifts, and your manamorphose. you now have drawn a card, have all your rituals in your graveyard, alongside a Past in Flames, and 8 mana. Flashback Past in Flames (3 mana left in mana pool), and recast all your rituals, saving Seething Song, Increasing Vengeance, and Manamorphose for last. Then do this:
Flashback Seething Song.
In response, flashback Increasing Vengeance for RR targeting Seething Song.
What will happen is this: Increasing Vengeance will copy Seething Song twice, adding RRRRRRRRRR to your mana pool, after which Seething Song will resolve, adding an additional RRRRR. You now have 15 red mana. Flashback Manamorphose to add UU. Flashback Gifts for RRRU, and you have 10 red mana and U in your mana pool. You can then search out a second Past in Flames, Empty the Warrens, and some combination of rituals or Manamorphoses. It doesn't really even matter. Regardless of where they put Empty the Warrens or Past in Flames, you'll have enough mana to flashback or cast Past in Flames and play an Empty the Warrens at a lethal storm count. Now, obviously they won't always give you those two cards, but if you go through that as a goldfish, you'll notice that you frequently have mana to spare there. That's because the bare minimum they can give you is sufficient. Say they give you Increasing Vengeance and Past in Flames (While that may seem counterintuitive, that's actually the best play they can make, since if you don't have a ritual to copy with Vengeance, you fizzle.) Then you just:
Play the land, 4 mana left. Cast the ritual. Cast increasing vengeance copying it. Add RRRRRR to your mana pool. Cast your Manamorphose. With 6 mana, cast your Past in Flames, leaving RR left. You can then flashback all your rituals, and you'll have just enough to cast Seething Song and Increasing Vengeance simultaneously, at which point closing out the game should be easy. Of course, you won't have blue mana, but that's what the Manamorphose is for!

Now, you may have noticed something about that route: It takes a LOT of red mana to get going. And it does. Going off early with this deck isn't easy. So, here are some Gifts piles that work later in the game:



Both of those are very useful at different times, such as when you don't have a ritual to copy, or when you want to go VERY big, since Goblin Electromancer will usually let you kill immediately with Aurelia's Fury, which is helpful if you think they have Echoing Truth or Maelstrom Pulse.

This is a lot of information to throw at you, so here I'm going to give you a few ground rules to work with, to try to figure out when to combo out.
1. Plan ahead. In other storm decks you've probably played, it's enough to tap out, slam your bomb, and hope for the best if it resolves, because you'll see enough cards and play enough mana. Not here. In this deck, you'll be working with relatively scarce resources when it comes to mana spells and draw pieces, so you have to plan ahead and KNOW that you can win with what you already have, rather than trusting that you can draw into whatever cards you need.
2. Make sure you have enough U. Usually, you won't fizzle from not having enough mana to cast your spells. You can manage that ok with a bit of forethought. The biggest factor that will make you fizzle is not having the blue mana to cast Gifts Ungiven. This makes cards like Manamorphose and Calciform Pools much stronger here than normal, and you should always think twice before blowing a Manamorphose or neglecting to play the Pools. This will lead to tough decisions, such as between playing pools and leaving Izzet Charm up on their turn, but you just have to figure out what the optimal play there is. You also have to keep in mind how much red mana it will take to get the Increasing Vengeance mana engine going, since that can pose a major speedbump as well. This is another factor that makes the deck so hard to play: choosing to get an island or Hallowed Fountain off that Scalding Tarn on turn 1 can kill you 4 turns later, when you need that land to be a Steam Vents.
3. Know what cards beat you, and how to circumvent them. If you think they have Echoing Truth, make sure you can beat it by getting the necessary countermagic. Make sure you can deal with their Deathrite Shaman. I'll probably write another piece about playing around or through hate soon, but in the meantime, try to figure out what they have, and how you can beat it.
4. Know your limits. If you can't figure out how to go off that turn, sometimes you can't. Sometimes it's better to Gifts for card advantage and countermagic, turtle for a couple turns, and sculpt your board for a bit, or even to hold off on Gifts for a turn. You have to be able to recognize those times and roll with the punches.
5. PRACTICE! Even after reading a primer, Gifts Ungiven is still an incredibly difficult card to play. It's gonna take a while before you've mastered all the ins and outs of it, and you have to accept that and keep trying.

And that's how to play Gifts Ungiven offensively and go off with Ritual Gifts. Keep those rules in mind in the future, as we turn to the other side of the coin: playing Gifts Ungiven defensively and preparing for the kill!

Thanks for reading,
LegitKarona

Ok, so you have your main deck ready. You've goldfished it, you've worked out the kinks, you're ready to sideboard. If you aren't, go to my first post, How to Build Ritual Gifts, Part I: The Maindeck, and work through it.

Now. The Sideboard.

First, I'm going to briefly tell you what NOT to do. Don't just throw out a random sideboard of good-looking answers in numbers that intuitively feel right to you and go to the nearest tournament. That's a recipe for disaster. You can tell who the people are who do this, because their sideboards look like this:

That was a sideboard I designed for a draft of MemoryLapse's R/W lockdown deck. In my defense, R/W prison decks are notoriously hard to sideboard with, and I was really more interested in proving he should play blue than actually making a good list. But there's no excuse for sloppiness here.

So, how do you make your sideboard? First thing's first, run your deck through a gauntlet of what you'd expect to see, and play a few rounds on cockatrice, WITHOUT any sideboard. You're trying to get creamed, to see where your weaknesses are, which matchups need help, what cards are dead when. I guarantee you, you will be surprised at least once. Also, play sideboarded matches against them, just don't make any changes. You want to see what to prepare for in the way of hate.

Then, when that's done, you can build your sideboard. Start by isolating the toughest matchups, and most common matchups. For us, that's some combination of Jund, Affinity, Twin, and Tron, depending on what your maindeck choices were. Then, you figure out what cards are strong against them, and what cards in your maindeck are weak against them. Keep in mind that any blue instants you can use give you a lot of value, as even one copy in your sideboard is magnified in effect by your merchant scrolls. Here are a few cards to consider:
Trickbind. If you aren't including this, you're doing something wrong. It basically hands you the storm combo matchup on a plate for the cost of 1 sideboard slot.
Hurkyl's Recall: this really isn't strong enough to beat Affinity nowadays, but it's a good card to have access to and makes your scrolls much stronger. Also, it usually beats their hate cards.
Gigadrowse: Oh, how the mighty have fallen. In any other meta this card would be another auto-include, even maindeckable, but right now, countermagic appears to be at an almost all-time low, and it just isn't as relevant. You should still play it as a 1-of, but you won't get a huge amount of use out of it. Just wait though. Someday soon, Gigadrowse may rule the world.
Those are the obvious ones, the blue instants. However, there are a lot of other cards you could play:
Countermagic suite change: this would switch out Spell Pierce for Spell Snare or vice-versa. It's very helpful, especially in matchups where Remand is bad, but you're playing 4 to boost Grapeshot.
alternative win cons: I've always loved Empty the Warrens and Burst of Speed, and one of the changes I've been meaning to make to my list at some point is to switch to that from Grapeshot, now that you can play Aurelia's Fury over Martial Coup. However, another good one is to play Unburial Rites and a fatty for the aggro decks like Affinity or Boggle, which will fairly often have no way to deal with a turn 4 Griselbrand.

Interlude: Unburial Rites in Ritual Gifts:
Unburial Rites is a good card. For those who don't know, an obscure rule of magic lets you search for fewer than 4 cards with Gifts Ungiven, you just still have to put 2 into your graveyard. So, if you search out Unburial Rites, a giant fatty, and nothing else, both go to your graveyard, so you can untap and flashback Unburial Rites to get some huge monster down. It's a good strategy, but not very resilient to hate, and terrible in today's world of Deathrite Shaman. However, if you're splashing white, you would do well to add it to your sideboard. Choosing a fatty to bring with it can be difficult, except for the part where it isn't. Griselbrand is so incredibly good in this deck that it's hard to argue for any other fatty. You're siding it in against aggro decks, which typically have a very hard time killing it or racing it, and even if they do manage to kill it, you can usually activate it at least once, at which point they still have to deal with the fact that they're facing a storm combo player who just drew 7 cards. There are situations where Elesh Norn, Inkwell Leviathan, or even really out-of-the-box choices like Stormtide Leviathan could be good, but frankly, even then Griselbrand is probably better.

Now back to topic.

I can't guide you step-by-step through making a sideboard like a did the manabase or the maindeck. Instead, you have to take this overall approach in mind, and do it yourself. It'll require a lot of testing, because this is really when you hash out your deck and do all the tuning you need to not feel ashamed when you play it at a PTQ. Just keep a few things in mind:

1. Start by playing without it and noting what cards are bad when.
2. Then, choose your cards to shore up tough matchups, making sure to match the numbers of cards you put in to the numbers of cards you take out each match. This can be a grueling process, especially since even a small change to the maindeck can invalidate much of your sideboard plan, but trust me, it really pays off.
3. Sideboard for the good and ok matchups too, but use Merchant Scroll to minimize the space you have to dedicate for those matchups.
4. Make sure that you can do something different games 2 and 3 from what you did game 1. Don't let yourself get blown out by a Slaughter Games. That's one of the worst feelings you will ever have in your time playing Magic.
5. And I cannot stress this one enough, PAY ATTENTION! watch what other decks are doing well. Keep up to date with the kinds of choices people make, in their maindecks and sideboards. Don't sideboard for last week. Sideboard for now.
6. Similarly, don't assume that the card they had maindeck will still be there game 2. Make sure you have a plan for what they're bringing in. Try to anticipate the hate cards they'll have against you. That's another reason to start off playing without a sideboard: you tend to remember the hate cards that beat you, and it'll show you what you really need to worry about from your opponents.

And that's it. I wish I could give you more information on this, but Sideboarding has always been my biggest weakness, and I'm far from a great authority on the subject. Perhaps some day I'll give you all more detail on this subtle and complex part of deck design, but until then, good luck.

And that's Ritual Gifts! Hopefully, with this 3-part guide to building it, you have a better grasp of how to make your list and tune it to your specifications and satisfactions. While I can't promise I'll get it done as fast as I did for this (a whole walk through in one day isn't easy), my next assignment is to delve deep into the other great challenge: PLAYING Ritual Gifts!

Thanks for reading,
LegitKarona

Now that I've covered the approach you should take to choosing the spells in your Ritual Gifts list, it's time to turn to something more difficult to master: the manabase.

I'm just going to say this to start off with: lands are hard. It's hard to get the numbers right. It's hard to cut wonderful, fun, interesting cards for boring, stupid basic Islands. But you have to do it. And if you slack on this part of the deck, you will lose. A lot.

The best place to start with is with these 3 rules. These apply not just to Ritual Gifts, but to every deck you will ever make, so make sure you remember these.
1. There's no such thing as too few lands. This isn't really true, because we can all agree that playing 28 lands in your Affinity Deck is excessive and ineffective, but in the real world, it rings pretty true. No one is playing as many lands as they should be. Remember that when you're building your manabase and you consider going down to 21 lands. Really, you should be going up to 23.
2. If you're playing a color, you need a minimum of 10 ways to produce it. That doesn't ALWAYS hold true, but that's really a good rule to go by, if possible. A bare minimum of 10 ways to produce every color in your deck. If you can't manage that with the amount of lands you've set aside, it's time to cut some spells. Just a splash? Doesn't matter. That splash won't do you any good if you can't play the spells. Yes, if it's a late-game control deck and the splash is tiny, you can go below, but those cases are few and far between.
3. Basics are your friends. Use them. You especially have no excuse for this in today's world of fetchlands, fetchlands everywhere. Basic lands allow you to cast your spells through cards like Blood Moon, which is a HUGE threat against Ritual Gifts. If you haven't done your homework and played basics, that is. Also, being able to fetch out an untapped land without taking 2 damage is a HUGE advantage, and an important option against various aggro decks.

With those rules in mind, let's get to it.
The first thing to figure out is, what's your splash, if any? A lot of Ritual Gifts decks will splash white or red, even occasionally green, for additional options when it comes to tutor targets. And while this may sound idiotic, your splash will seriously change your manabase. The second thing is, you're playing a lot of fast mana accelerators, all of which are mana sources themselves. You need to keep that in mind when you choose the ratio of lands to spells. If, say, you want more lands, but can't cut any more business, yes, you probably want to cut some rituals.
Let's take my list as an example. I have 22 land slots left over. I also have a LOT of acceleration, so my lands have to count. Finally, I'm playing a white splash.

First things first. Time to add basics.
3 Island
1 Mountain
No plains, because that would warp the next part of the manabase
The next thing to do is to figure out if you're playing fetchlands and shocks. You usually will, but there are often decks I see playing a fetch-shock base when the really don't have to, and I groan. You have to remember that fetch-shock manabases have a very real effect on your life total, such that you don't want to use them unless you really have to. Here, however, we really do, so in they come.
4 Scalding Tarn
2 Misty Rainforest
Scalding Tarn is strictly better than rainforest here, since it can fetch basic mountain. Also, since most of your crucial cards are blue, and red is supplemented by all the rituals, all your fetches should be able to get basic island.
2 Steam Vents
1 Hallowed Fountain
Hallowed Fountain allows for the splash of either land. Why only 2 Steam Vents? You don't have a good way to recoup life, and already have a tough time racing or stabilizing against aggro decks as it is.

Now, let's check how many sources for each color we have. We have:
11 Blue sources
9 Red sources
7 White sources
So, we need a couple more red and white sources, and probably a couple more blue sources. However, it's time to branch out into lands that don't deal you damage.
2 Sulfur Falls
2 Seachrome Coast
These are fairly easy choices. Sulfur Falls is almost always just a Volcanic Island here, and Seachrome Coast is perfect for a deck playing relatively few lands. However, we also want a way to fix mana during storm turns, so in comes:
2 Calciform Pools
These allow you to store up mana for going off or for bigger Aurelia's furies, and fix your mana for white, or for blue when you go off, which is an issue since you don't play U-producing rituals.
Time to take stock! We have:

16 Blue Sources (Calciform Pools counts as 1/2, as it needs forever to produce a color on its own)
11 Red Sources
10 White Sources.
That's good enough. However, there are still 3 slots left. How do you fill them? Well, one of them is obvious:
1 Desolate Lighthouse
Desolate Lighthouse is absurdly good in this deck, making any time you get manaflooded infinitely more bearable, dumping rituals into your graveyard for a giant Past in Flames, digging you into more action, and giving you the advantage any time you're up against control and you both have to turtle for a bit. That leaves 2 slots. I chose to fill them with:
2 Halimar Depths
Halimar Depths, when combined with the 10 Shuffle effects you have access to on turn 2 and the 16 you have on turn 3, is an incredibly good means of card selection, and will go miles toward drawing you into business or mana or rituals or answers.

So, let's recap. We have:

22 lands
19 Blue sources
11 Red sources
10 White sources
It all checks out! Are you done?

NO! Now that you've set up your deck, it's time for preliminary testing! This means, you goldfish it for several games, and see what works and what doesn't. Chances are, some of your bullets won't work the way they should, one of your colors will be too hard to get or you'll take too much damage from your lands, or something else entirely. I can't say what it'll be specifically, but you now have a rough draft, one that won't work properly at all. From those goldfishes, you tune the list, changing your choices at various points along the line, until you have a maindeck you're satisfied with.

But wait! You don't have a sideboard! Well, that comes later. Believe me, I'll get to that soon.

Thanks for reading,
LegitKarona

Please allow me to introduce myself. I'm called LegitKarona, just Karona or LK for short. To briefly talk about my background, I'm a longtime magic player, primarily in vintage and Old Extended with some brief forays into Standard. I'm a proud member of Team DoomBladeGuy (basically me and several of my magic friends trying to sweep large local tournaments), and have at multiple times been on the cusp of going pro, though I've never been good enough to make it.

Right, enough about me. To work.

I've been playing Ritual Gifts for over a year now, and my successes and failures have been pretty well documented on the forums. For those who don't know, Ritual Gifts is a blue and red control deck that uses fast mana spells alongside Gifts Ungiven to first play Gifts Ungiven early, then use that to set up a massive Past in Flames, replaying all your spells up until then and finally using all that card advantage to kill your opponent, usually with some kind of Storm spell. However, as most of you probably already know, the deck is incredibly difficult to use properly, both to build and play. My hope with these is to create a walkthrough for how to start winning with Ritual Gifts, so that it's both easier to pick up the strategy, and so more people come to realize how good it is.

With that in mind, let's start at the beginning: making your deck.

The first few steps will be pretty obvious. First, you set aside 22 of your 60 slots for lands. When you're done sculpting your deck, you'll fill those in, adding or subtracting as necessary (usually adding). This is also a good thing to do every time you make a deck by the way. Then you figure out your core. You figure out what cards you really need in your opening hand. Here, that's also pretty easy at first:
4 Merchant Scroll
4 Gifts Ungiven
That's the real engine of the deck. Merchant Scroll gets either powerful answers or a Gifts Ungiven, which then allows you to generate card advantage and ultimately power out a win. Speaking of which:
2 Past in Flames
You want 2 here because sometimes you need to play it multiple times in a combo turn to win. This is also a mandatory include in the deck. Also, from here on you want to keep a running count of how many cards are left. You've now filled up just over half your deck with:


Now let's turn to the mana. This deck is very mana-hungry when it combos off, but you also need to leave space for answer cards: going all in with this deck won't work, it's not fast enough. Start with the cards that work best with multiples. Desperate Ritual can be very good if you have 2 in the late game, so 4 of them is a good place to start. You then want to fill in more slots with instant speed accelerants that you can flashback. Also, in order to supply the huge amounts of mana you need to win, you have to play at least 1 Increasing Vengeance, since flashbacking it for 2 after a past in flames and copying a ritual will basically constitute an auto-win. Finally, you need a way to produce U to power your tutors afterwards, so Manamorphose is a card you need a lot of. I'm here going to show you the minimum numbers of each ritual that you'll need to be competitive, at least in my experience. You could go lower on some of them, or tweak numbers, but do so with caution:
4 Desperate Ritual
3 Manamorphose
2 Pyretic Ritual
2 Seething Song
1 Increasing Vengeance
From there, you have used 44 slots, for a deck that looks like this:


From here, you have 16 cards left. These are your cards, the cards you use to make it your own. I'll just list what you'll need, though:

A kill condition (2-3 cards, usually)
Some more engine pieces (also 2-3 cards, to ensure that you draw enough action every game)
a few bullets to fetch with Merchant Scroll
and the rest should be answers. Also, to complicate matters: there is no objective best set of cards here.

I can already hear some of the voices on this forum fuming at this. How can there not be a best list? The answer is that you don't build your decks to be the best for everyone ever. You build them for one tournament, and for you, to maximise your chances. For decks like Jund, with comparatively simple decision trees, that usually is the objective "best" list. But here, the number of critical decisions you have to make each game is so huge that no one, not you, not me, not Kai Budde, can consciously analyze all of them and make the "best" play. Instead, we compartmentalize, take shortcuts. We skip over decisions that have historically proven ineffective. We all do it. However, as a result of this, we tend to develop blind spots, places where our brain skips over the correct answer. "Of COURSE I didn't think about Gifting for Manamorphose Remand Seething Song and Island, why would you ever do that?" But nonetheless, that play could have won you a game, and instead you lost. This is unavoidable, and you shouldn't try to escape it.

However, this gives us a new approach towards the rest of the deck: in the places and matchups where you understand the decision trees involved, and won't miss things, you are going to win, because this deck, when played perfectly like that, is the best deck in the format. The rest of your deck has to be about two things: making it easier to navigate your blind spots, and steering the game away from places where those blind spots matter. You have to know yourself pretty well for this to work, but hey. No one said it would be easy.

This is probably getting to esoteric, so here's how I approached this: I knew I wanted to win without the combat step, which excluded a lot of win conditions like Empty the Warrens or Unburial Rites. And I wanted to win in one turn, which basically narrowed it down to Grapeshot. I then needed a way to get it out of my deck, and rather than play dead cards like Noxious Revival to power up Gifts Ungiven, I instead decided to play 2 Muddle the Mixtures. Then, I knew that I worked best when playing countermagic, and that Remand was crucial to getting a Grapeshot kill against decks that didn't deal a lot of damage to themselves, so I played 3 Remands. I needed a way to permanently deal with dangerous spells from my opponent, so I brought in 3 Spell Snares. That left 7 cards.

From there, I analyzed my weaknesses and vulnerabilities. As you probably know, I'm a longtime vintage player (God knows I harp on about it too much). As a result, I'm already pretty used to beating targeted discard, countermagic, and artifact-based disruption, having been playing the Mana Drain mirror and Stax matches for years. However, I'm not used to cards like Deathrite Shaman, and fish-style critters messing up your game. As a result, I set up my remaining cards to help deal with problematic utility creatures. First, I put in a singleton Pongify as a scroll target, because this deck doesn't particularly care about a 3/3 vanilla guy. I added a Cyclonic Rift as a late-game bomb against disruption and a way to cheaply bounce annoying little creatures (and Liliana). I wanted to improve my defensive gifts piles, so I added in a Snapcaster Mage. I wanted to speed the deck up so that I could race if necessary, so I added 2 Goblin Electromancers. Finally, and this is cheating a bit, I added the newly-spoiled card Aurelia's Fury, as a way to both win if you have a huge amount of mana and they'd dealt with your grapeshot and to kill large amounts of annoying creatures. For the 60th card, I added a Seething Song, to help me get bigger Furies. I hashed out a manabase, something which I'm sure I'll go into greater depth on at a later time, and I got this:


That's my current list. I'm gonna be tweaking it for some time (for instance, the Electromancers seem to be mostly just a lightning rod for all their removal, which had previously been dead), but it's been working out very well so far. I hope you enjoyed this, and that it helps you in building your own Gifts list. Join me soon when I start discussing the sideboard and manabase, and then move on to one of the hardest tasks of all: playing Ritual Gifts!

Thanks for reading,

LegitKarona