Belcherless Gifts Belcher: Analysis and a SCGP9 Rochester report (2nd)

[dicemanx]

2) The draw engine is not right.  As you say, you not infrequently discarded two cards to Thirst.  That is unacceptable.  I was really dissapointed in how Thirst functioned in the deck becuase I don't feel there were enough artifacts to support it.  Furnace is pretty weak right now and probably doesn't deserve the space.  I tooled around with alternative draw engines that I would be happy to talk about at a future date.  Suffice to say I think the approach my teammates took in Richmond and Rochester with the deck is closer to what I think may be optimal.

3) Duress is much weaker than it should be.  I think that more disruption as a rule is better since so much of what these decks have is symmetrical: 4 FOW, 4 Drain, etc.  I think there are alternatives that aren't being discussed here that should be explored...

4) I wanted Vampiric Tutor to be good.  Becuase it is a good card.  It finds Tinker, Academy, etc.  But this card was not good.  The black often got in the way of another card.  This may be becuase I was running Duress - I can't be sure.  But I found that this card would probably be better as something else despite how good it seemed in theory.

I'm not sure if we can so readily surmise that the Tfk draw engine is not correct. TfKs are good most of the time, and even if you do have to discard two cards at times you are either discarding lands or business spells that have little impact. Skeletal Scryings have their own issues, one of which you actually outlined in your points #3 and #4 - the reliance on black mana isn't a good thing. We will discuss other draw engines at a future time, as I too am not prepared to discuss the alternatives right now.

The Duress and Vampiric are cards that I was liking very much in the SCG event - the Vamp was definitely living up to its theoretical potential. And as I mentioned, there were times that I wished that I had a full complement of Duresses in the deck. At this stage I'm still very unsure what the ideal configuration is, especially since there is such an overlap in mana considerations, disruption considerations, and draw engines (the increase in black spells and having the correct mana base to support it being one such example).

[Xenoben187]

As I read through the posts here a thought keeps coming to my mind.  Is Gifted.fr becoming more and more 4cc with a 10x better draw engine and win condition?

The deck started out with just burning wish for small amounts of utility and synergy with tw/will/tinker.  Now Cunning wish is being added for more utility.

People are adding white (including myself) for Balance aka the best card in 4cc, which I find incredible in the deck.

EE is being added instead of furnaces (those who really played 4cc remember how great EE's were).

People are trying to find more room for Scryings also.

As a side note, Old man is still incredible against fish, even with all this kira nonsense, she still gets reb'd, Old man is also extremely good against fcg.

[Webster]

As I read through the posts here a thought keeps coming to my mind. Is Gifted.fr becoming more and more 4cc with a 10x better draw engine and win condition?

The deck started out with just burning wish for small amounts of utility and synergy with tw/will/tinker. Now Cunning wish is being added for more utility.

Branching out to incorporate white seems bad to me. One of the strongest qualities that the current Gifts builds has is its resiliency to non-basic land hate. Running 4 basic lands helps out so much against fish, shop aggro, and FCG. Being able to ignore (partially) wastelands makes the opponent's strategy of avoiding walking into mana drain leading to brokenness much harder for them to accomplish.

Playing with cunning wish is still in its developmental stages right now for Gifts.dec, but it seems solid. The problem that I saw in a lot of games was using burning wish on a utility spell versus wishing for time walk. I would hate to use it on a utility spell because it felt like a waste. Obviously, one cannot include multiple burning wishes for obvious reasons (reminisces of Long ... ). The solution is to add the next best wish, cunning.

I don't think balance is needed in this deck, well, at least not in my meta. Certainly, every card inclusion is metagame-based. To say otherwise is naivete. I could see running balance in a field with high amounts of FCG, shop aggro, fish and all its variants. But then again, I love my basic lands and pyroclasm along with old man do just fine for me.


Webster

[BreathWeapon]

The only time I've Burning Wished for Duress was in situations where my opponent was holding multiple STPs or Mutations. Why pay 1RB to remove 1 card in the opponent's hand when Cabal Therapy will remove all of the copies of that card in the opponent's hand?