The gifts build that I have playtested against is very similar to that, running one less island, one more underground sea, one less chain of vapors, but one more repeal.  Other than that, very standard build.

As I mentioned before, as far as lockdown/disruption goes I pack

4x REB effect
4x Root Maze
4x Null Rod
4x Gorilla Shaman
4x Wasteland
1x Strip Mine

In this matchup I find Null Rod strictly better than challice.  Why?  Two pretty important reasons.  A:  Null Rod stops all the 0 cost artifacts as well as the 1 drops such as sol ring and mana vault.  This might not seem too big a deal, but when Gifts can actually resolve the big-cost blue spells in the deck and the big-cost win condition of ETW using a reusable sol ring or the equivilant of a dark ritual (mana Vault) it's going to lose you a remarkable number of games.  B:  With CotV one play that I have seen more times than I can be happy with is the Yawg's will + storm + mini ETW.  A player can mini - ETW for six by dropping two moxen that get countered and then casting ETW.  Then with a ritual or 1 cost mana artifact in the yard they can do it again.  My version of R/G can stop an ETW for six, but it will be hard pressed to stop two.  Sometimes keeping the manastones on the board is a better bet.

I can play around, over, and through good Gifts decks simply by cutting their deck where it hurts - the manabase.  If I could find room in this deck for Sphere of Resistance and Trinisphere I might just run them   As it is now, over 1/3 of the deck damages my opponent's mana curve or draw/tutor engine.  With either a Null Rod or Gorilla Shaman/Root maze combo in play moxen and other mana artifacts become useless.  Root Maze slows down mana development by one turn, or often two turns given the popularity of fetchlands.  Red Elemental Blast is used to hit these decks where it hurts the most.  Believe it or not that does not usually involve nailing an Ancestral Recall or Gifts Ungiven, but rather the bounce spell that they will NEED to play in order to resolve a big enough ETW.  As I mentioned before, this deck has two components - the disruption and the beatdown.  The "Lock and Clock" as I like to call them.  The way you are describing your gifts matchup makes it sound like you play a challice and then sit there waiting for them to own you!  My deck drops the lockdown components, then it sets the clock up right away.  7-8 turns is a typical, conservative win for my deck.  That might seem pretty slow, but consider the fact that a normal Gifts deck needs to ramp up to FIVE land cards in play in order to pull off a ETW win (I consider an ETW of 8-10 a win), barring the unlikely Dark Ritual + ETW play (they only have one copy of each card in the deck.  Even given the tutors that are throughout the deck this is a pretty difficult card combo to count on.) or my own play mistake of walking into an obvious mana drain.  If I successfully shut down their artifact mana base (which if I do not I will undoubtedly lose to this deck) consider the likelihood of this deck drawing and dropping 5 lands in 7 successive turns.  They have about 15-16 lands in the typical build (if not fewer), and six or so of those are fetchlands.  Also count on one strip effect from your side of the board.  That makes the 5 land threshold a difficult one to reach.  The next key component of pulling the win off against this deck is saving REB for the spell that really counts.  Let them Gifts all day.  I've even been known to allow my opponent to resolve an Ancestral Recall (though this is more dangerous and arguably stupid, especially if your opponent is packing 2+ copies of Misdirection on top of FoW because their odds of drawing into a free counter becomes too good).  The only truly relevant spells become the bounce spells that will target Null Rod or Root Maze, or the countermagic that may target one of the said lock mechanics.

I've playtested this matchup a ton, and I can honestly say the more you learn about the way that Gifts works the better your odds will be.  I'm not saying that this is an easy matchup, but I AM saying that if you play your cards right it is a slightly favorable matchup.  However my build of R/G doesn't pack any sideboard against this popular deck save one additional copy of pyroblast, so a Gifts build running some random hate such as Flametongue Kavu or even the more typical Pyroclasm can improve their odds of winning post board.

Is R/G a good choice for this metagame?  Well, that depends on how much Oath/Ichorid you are seeing.  These are the two decks that R/G has the most trouble with, hands down, no questions asked, thank you come again.  Lots of Fish in your local area?  No problem!  Add another Bolt and maybe a pair of Chain lightnings, add a third rancor, and watch your matchup vs phish swim favorably from 40/60 in their favor to 60/40 in yours.  Tons of Combo?  It's a simple matter of removing the burn and adding spheres of resistance (with 8 spirit guides you can drop any of these on turn one) or possibly boarding these cards.  But when I go to local tournies and see 4+ Oath decks at every one of them, I find my sideboard turning into an unrecognizable monstrosity that will hardly help me against the other decks in the field.  I had 9 cards dedicated to stopping Oath, and yes, they worked, but they weakened my matchups against other decks so badly that it wasn't worth running R/G anymore.  Ichorid's ability to bypass Null Rod and REB entirely hose my version as well.  When you're staring down a turn 3-4 40/40 trampler and you have no counterspells,  you find yourself wishing you were running something else.  Sideboarding against this deck might be more managable - in come the crypts, out come the null rods, race your heart out - but I have not done enough playtesting against this deck.  I just consider it an auto-loss, and am comfortable doing so since it is not very popular locally.

I've been playing R/G beats (though some call my builds closer to R/G phish or something) for about three years now, and I've watched the deck adapt itself to a number of metagames.  I have to say the golden days of R/G in my opinion were back when trinisphere was unrestricted and workshop decks ran rampant throughout the metagame.  R/G just had so many awesome plays against good ol' stax 

In the current meta R/G has a lot more trouble, in my opinion.  First of all the deck has to somehow survive the first two rounds of a tournament.  Any properly metagamed version of R/G is going to have trouble against random matchups, but there are a couple not-so-random matchups that I am more worried about.

As you identified right off the bat, Oath DESTROYS this deck.  Absolutely demolishes it.  Looking at the deck you might expect some sort of combo to be harder on R/G, but nothing is harder than Oath.  Nothing except, perhaps, ichorid.  Now that Ichorid is becoming more popular there may very well be two horrible matchups in the metagame.  Then again my version of R/G runs no graveyard hate...  I think further discussion might be more meaningful after a decklist.

Land/Artifact Mana (22)
1 Strip Mine
4 Wasteland
4 Wooded Foothills
4 Taiga
2 Treetop village
2 Forest
2 Mountain
1 Stomping Ground
1 Mox Ruby
1 Mox Emerald

Critters (18)
4 Kird Ape
4 Gorilla Shaman
4 Elvish Spirit Guide
4 Simian Spirit Guide
2 River Boa

Utility (8)
3 Sylvan Library
2 Rancor
3 Lightning Bolt

Disruption (12)
4 Null Rod
4 Root maze
2 Red Elemental Blast
2 Pyroblast

Sideboard (15)
4 Krosan Grip
4 Elvish Lyrist
1 Druid Lyrist
4 Artifact Mutation
1 Lightning Bolt
1 Red Elemental Blast

As you can see the deck is highly metagamed, which I think any good R/G build should be.

Card Choices:

The manabase is really nice and I hardly ever find myself having what I would consider mana problems.  I don't even touch the three curve in this deck besides the spirit guides, which are removed for mana as often as they are cast.  Therefore I am perfectly comfortable sitting on 2 lands and accomplishing everything I need to in a turn.  The 2 Treetop Villages have provided the clock I need at times, and at worst they are a forest that comes into play tapped (which under root maze makes them look even better  ).

The creature base needs some explanation.  River Boa is somewhat of a relic of the past.  I don't really like him that much, and after reading this article I will probably playtest hidden gibbons/gorillas as well as Ohran Viper.  I'm particularly fond of the Viper    Kird Ape is the backbone of the deck, since this deck doesn't exactly beat opponents down with remarkable speed and tends more toward disruption.  Gorilla Shaman is a necessary utility creature for obvious reasons, but some people might question the need for Gorilla Shaman on top of Null Rod.  Destroying artifact mana sources IS that important with this deck.  If you give gifts or slaver as much mana as they want you are going to lose every game against them, no questions asked.  Shut their mana off and you have a fighting chance.  The Spirit Guides also are a bit unorthadox, but being able to drop a turn one sylvan or null rod, or having root maze with REB backup is AMAZING with this deck in this metagame.  The synergy between Simian Spirit Guide and pyro/reb is amazing as well, since it basically allows you to FoW any blue spell - a play that turns up more than you'd think and ALWAYS catches opponents by surprise.  Also in the phish matchup your 'mana acceleration' turns into 2/2 creatures which pose a real threat.  Slap rancor on any one of these guys and your opponent is staring down quite the clock.  I am rarely sad to see 1-2 of these in hand, but when I get more than that it becomes inefficient, and I may consider cutting one of the ESGs for some other creature or utility spell.

The utility in this deck is essentially what allows the deck to exist in the first place.  Without sylvan library this deck tends to draw a lot of dead cards.  It may be wise to include a 4th, and I used to run 4 in a previous build.  Sure sometimes you draw two, but sylvan is not only a prime counter target (so having a second is sometimes nice) but holding one dead card in opening hand is better than drawing 5 dead cards right afterward.  As  you may notice there are plenty of cards you do not want to draw duplicates of in this deck (Null Rod, Root Maze, Sylvan itself) and plenty of potentially "dead" cards that  you may never want to draw at all in certain matchups (REB, Pyroblast, Null Rod, Even Lightning Bolt).  Sylvan wins you games in so many matchups I'm almost talking myself into slapping a fourth copy in the deck right now!  Lightning bolt is becoming something of a necessary evil in this deck.  Usually I end up just shooting them at the head of my opponent, but every so often these cards find a Welder or Phyrexian Negator and it makes them worth all the while.  They are also the one reason my version of R/G can beat U/W phish (though it's not exactly easy...).  I'm never unhappy to see a rancor in opening hand.  These things mean my 1/1 gorilla shaman becomes a 3/1 beatstick of doom, while my respectable 2/3 kird apes are suddenly downright scary 4/3 critters.  That's a five turn clock for those of you who are bad at math.  When you plop one of those types of threats down on turn 2 (and get them swinging right away on turn 2 also) my deck, which is loaded with disruption, becomes tough to beat.  I've tried running more than 2 copies of rancor and find that as bad as it is to sometimes not draw one rancor, it is usually worse to draw 2 copies in an opening hand.  Especially if you have no creature ready to cast it on (which sometimes happens).

The disable of this deck is what has earned it the name R/G Phish in some circles.  Rather than just plopping as many threats down on the board as possible and racing, this build drops one lockdown mechanic, then starts widdling away at an opponent's life.  Null Rod is the single most powerful card that you can be running in this metagame.  Every single deck, with very few exceptions, is or should be either packing this or a full set of moxen.  When you play gifts or slaver from their perspective, null rod pretty much cuts the deck in half.  They have bounce and ways of removing the card, of course, but the point is that this is one card that both decks HAVE to remove.  With new empty the warrens builds, gifts can sometimes build up a mox/mox/dark ritual/empty the warrens play which is tough to recover from, but with extra forms of disruption such as root maze and strip effects this deck quickly makes it an uphill battle for most opponnents packing either of these decks.  Root maze is constantly underestimated and much of its usefulness lies in the inability of opponents to learn to play around it.  If you know how root maze affects your deck it is a lot less of a problem.  REB/Pyroblast is an amazing maindeck card that I would strongly recommend everyone to consider.  Looking at the dominant decks in the format I cannot come up with one good reason to move these to the board.  They are also my only response to tinker, which is practically an autoloss if it hits early.



Gifts is about a 60/40 in my favor,  50/50 post board (if they pack an anti-aggro board)

Slaver is about 70/30 in my favor,  75/25 post board (this is one of my best matchups)

Stax is about 40/60 in their favor,  75/25 post board (with the addition of 4 mutations and 4 grips)

Oath is about 85/15 in their favor, 50/50 post board (in come 5 lyrists, 4 krosan grips)

Ichorid is untested, but my speculation would be that it is heavily in their favor pre and post board.

Phish is about 55/45 in my favor, 40/60 in theirs after Jitte comes in.  This is a matchup that I continue to struggle with.

Variations of control such as landstill, ophidian, 4cc, or any random control matchup is usually slightly in my favor, but random aggro decks tend to outaggro me (even suicide black can sometimes have its way with me) and random combo matchups are probably among my worst.  Someone bringing a combo deck that didn't rely heavily on artifact mana would hose me pretty well.

Hope this helps!

-Sethy