About Bob and Gifts

[Gabethebabe]

Does Gifts like Bob?

In a tournament thread started by Hi-Val he states that Bob sucks in Gifts. A discussion developed but since Hi-Val´s thread was not meant to be a Bob-thread, I didn´t enter the discussion, but decided to open a topic to specifically discuss this subject.

Does Bob suck in Gifts?

First: there is Bob´s drawback. People say you can ignore it. They can say this many times, but the reality is that you can´t ignore it, less so in Gifts. Gifts has a lot of high cc cards and playing Bob means you have accelerated the game, as you oblige yourself to win quickly before Bob kills you. Multiple games have been lost because of Bob´s life loss. Also in decks that make better use of Bob than Gifts does.
Remember Spoils? Spoils wins you games and loses you games. That´s what Bob does as well. At the end, Spoils was ditched and now is nowhere to be seen. Bob is a better card than Spoils and I´m sure he will show his face in many decks now and in the future. But should it be Gifts?

There is the argument that the format hates creatures with toughness=1. They say that Darkblast owns Confidant. This may all be true, but is not an argument against playing Confidant. It´s not a reason not to play Welder, Lackey, Kataki or Mountain Goat. Confidant puts pressure on you, but it also puts pressure on your opponent. Your opponent needs to have his removal ready when Bob hits the table. Every turn that Bob makes it to your upkeep = 1 card. Drain a Darkblast: In the next upkeep, draw a card and in your next main phase, add 1 to your mana pool. No, when I play Bob in my deck, I don´t worry about the removal that my opponent packs. It is my opponent that has to worry about that. And he needs to worry about that NOW, as Bob is not a card that you can worry about later, like Meddling Mage, Null Rod, Pithing Needle are sometimes cards that you can worry about later.

There is the argument: I want to have Drain up turn 2. I think that is a silly argument as well. If you have, say, Mana Drain, an off-colour Mox, a Confidant, an Island and a Fetch in your opening grip, there is no rule that says that you have to fetch a Swamp, play Bob and do not have Mana Drain up turn 2. You can perfectly drop Fetch, Mox, have Drain up turn 2 and wait for a better moment to drop Confidant. Drop him turn 3 while you have UU open is a situation I would like to be in any time of the day.
An option is to drop Bob off an Underground and have Drain up turn 2. Sure, they can waste your precious Sea. But this buys you tempo to start milking Bob. So, no: Bob and Drain do not autoexclude eachother. In many games you will see only one of them in your opening hand and if you have the luxury to have both, make up your game plan depending on what you expect to face.

There is the argument that Bob is kinda slow. It takes two turns to gain card advantage out of him. Gifts can goldfish very early, especially if your opponent is silly enough to run into your Drain. A deck that can win that fast, can´t really use Bob. This I think is a valid argument against playing Dark Confidant.
But it is noted that if Gifts plays against a control deck, Dark Confidant is not slow at all. If you play against aggro, Dark Confidant buys you time or he can buy you cards. Against combo, Bob is a liability. Against Workshop I think he is pretty good and if you play a maindeck Swamp, he is even better.

There is the argument of the tournament results as shown by Phele. They look pretty good. But hey, how many of those good result are really caused by Bob? Results like that have to be regarded critically, because we know what happens if the best players of a metagame start playing a certain deck: that deck will appear in the T8 and people will say: "wow that is a good deck". But still: the numbers count. Were these good results actually caused by Dark Confidant? The skeleton of Gifts is strong, very strong. You can play 3 Metathran Soldier in Gifts and make T8. That doesn´t make Metathran Soldier a good addition to Gifts.

So yes: even though I think I was the first one to propose Bob in Gifts on TMD, I try to look at this idea with healthy criticism. It was hardly an innovative idea, as Bob is tried in like every deck that runs black. But I was kinda interested to see what other people did with this deck and how well they did with it.

Maybe the best approach is the one shown by IT. Bob as a sideboard card for the e.g control matchup.

So what do you think? Which arguments are the strongest, the ones against Bob, the ones in favour? Or should we leave the result undecided and conclude that you can play Gifts with Thirst, Gifts with Merchant Scroll and Gifts with Dark Confidant and that none of these variants is really better or worse than any other?

[raiL]

Most of the arguements about bob are made based on turn 1 drops. I doubt id want to drop him turn 3 against any deck in the format. For the most part i will go ahead and say that bob and mana drain are pretty much autoexclude. This is why confidant control instead plays Mana Leak. Its very easy to get 1U open, even first turn. The gifts structure is also at a higher curve then most decks running bob. They live off mana drain. And the fact that your more often then not taking 3-4 damage for a card is brutal.

Just think about it. What decks would you want to drop Confidant turn 3. And Confidant on turn 1 in gifts isnt a viable option.

[Phele]

I like this topic, as the fundamental question if Bob is just overhyped and for that reason tried out in almost every deck is pretty interesting.

Most of the arguments pro and against him are already mentioned by Gabe and others. I just would like to underline two arguments pro his inclusion. I haven't seen a better deck than Gifts (maybe come Intuition-AK-Builds from Eudemonia excluded) where Bob perfectly cooperates with Tendrils. I dont like the here in Germany as well much tried Dark-TPS version. TPS is centered around Will, Bargain, Necro and Desire – cards that don't interact with Confidant at all. There is nothing more horrible to Desire in Duress, FOW, Mox, Mox, Confidant, Confidant. Just as an example. The other way around in Gifts, which has a reactive nature but can win pretty quickly. Here Bob interacts perfectly with Tendrils, which we included maindeck together with the basic swamp. Just generate card advantage with some little beats until you are prepared - even with one life - to finish him most of the times with Tendrils with storm count 5-7.

One of the best players in our area has even decided – and that's not my choice but interesting to discuss - to cut Mana Drain at all and play a 4 Fow, 3 Mana Leak, 3 Duress configuration. His argument is to play this deck in the first turns like Ophidian-Mono-Blue and exchange spell for spell with counters until you resolve a Gift and win then anyway. I don't want to say that this is the way to go, but he has success with this build and that shows some insight in "I have to have Mana Drain mana up on turn two". As Gabe said, you still can with fetch Underground Sea and so get Mana Drain online - and when you resolve a Bob, there can be nothing better, than getting stripped by opponent as usually this means a Time Walk for Confidant – and Mana Drain isn't that crucial as many people think. I would never cut it out of my build but you can win easily without it.

The second point I want to mention is the greatness of first turn Bob against Staxx. Its not just good as in other matchups – its horrible for them. Played with a swamp you dont risk your landcount, but furthermore from that point on you have a cardadvantage machine that doesn't need any further mana investment and so doesnt care about Chalice, Null Rod, SoR, Uba whatever. And he is permanent that even beats for not to underestimate 2 points. A first turn Bob with a swamp has been an autowin for me against Staxx in most of the cases.

I do totally agree that Bob isn't the best midgame draw, where Thirst of Merchant Scroll would be definately better. But it's as well not the worst. I had many situations where I topdecked Bob after we both had our hands empty after a big counter fight. After that Bob can shine somehow, even though Merchant and Thirst would still be definately better. I just wanted to underline, that Bob isn't that kind of midgame draw that I don't want to see at all even though there are better. Probably many other arguments stand against his inclusion. I just wanted to give some insight not to throw away the Dark Gifts idea too easily. I am pretty interested in the further discussion.

Edit: I also felt that Hi-Vals report isn't the right place for this discussion, I just wantet to response to his pretty harsh criticism. I'm glad that Gabe started this new topic so we don't need to trash the report with this unrelated discussion. Just to base the discussion with more content, I post the links to some relevant decklists, as I have already done in Hi-Vals Thread:

http://www.zkforum.de/showthread.php?t=38965
http://www.morphling.de/top8decks.php?id=369
http://www.morphling.de/top8decks.php?id=357
http://www.morphling.de/top8decks.php?id=370
http://www.eudemonia.net/p9/
http://www.morphling.de/top8decks.php?id=359

[sean1i0]

I personally think that Gifts is not the place for a card like dark confidant; this is, of course, without any empirical data and just an idea, but here are my reasons for it:  Gifts is, currently, the most explosive of the drain decks and dark confidant is a card that begs of a word exactly the opposite of explosive.  Bob is a slow and steady card.  (a.k.a. I feel that Gifts decks are the rabbit and Bob is the tortoise:  both can win races, but they don't work well together.)

[AmbivalentDuck]

Without commenting on whether Bob should be in Gifts, overall, I do want to mention that he allows the inclusion of a Cabal Therapy in the maindeck.  Taking two key threats out of an opponent's hand and ramping storm by 2 the turn you combo out is not insignificant.  The card is far from dead on its own and lets you pull the plug on Bob when necessary.  That helps to negate his primary drawback without adding something that eats tempo like Divining Top to the deck.


EDIT: Fixed formatting tags

[cssamerican]

I don't think Bob is bad in conjunction with Gifts Ungiven, I just think he works better with the Intuition-Ak engine. My reasoning is similar to what people here have already expressed; Gifts wants to win by playing bombs whereas Intuition wants to win through card advantage. The Gift plan also requires running certain cards that increases the average casting cost of the deck, while this might seem trivial it does make Bob's drawback substantially more threatening. Bob suits the card advantage through low casting cost cards strategy, better than it does the bomb throwing high casting cost nature that comes with playing Gifts.

I don't think TfK is that good in conjunction with Gifts/ToA. TfK works so much better in Control Slaver it is not even funny, and I think if you run it in Gifts you are better using the Flame Vault kill. The whole concept of winning via storm is to cast a bunch of spells, but TfK forces you to choose card advantage or mana development. The problem with this is you need both card advantage and mana to cast ten spells. This puts you in a situation where you need to resolve Yawgmoth's Will to use the storm kill. This isn't necessarily bad, but it defeats the whole point of using the storm. You kill is now vulnerable to opposing counter magic, and if you can cast Yawgmoth's Will with a bunch of juice in your yard the kill is irrelevant Will was the win condition.

That leaves Merchant Scroll. I actually think this is probably the card that fits with Gifts/ToA the best, at least on paper. It can grab virtually every bomb in the deck, and the ones it can't grab are your Gifts Ungiven targets when you are ready to win. The only problem I see with this approach is the lack of cheap card advantage. This requires you to play very precise, and have a very keen sense on what to grab with your initial Gifts pile. So, while I think this is the strongest way to build a Mana Drain storm deck, I also think it makes it a much more difficult deck to play. Which is probably the reason I have stuck with the BoB-Intuition-Ak deck (Very similar to the winning list in Eudemonia) I have been playing lately, it is just so easy to play while being pretty powerful at the same time.

[PucktheCat]

This puts you in a situation where you need to resolve Yawgmoth's Will to use the storm kill. This isn't necessarily bad, but it defeats the whole point of using the storm. You kill is now vulnerable to opposing counter magic, and if you can cast Yawgmoth's Will with a bunch of juice in your yard the kill is irrelevant Will was the win condition.

If you use Burning Wish for your Tendrils kill you are "vulnerable to opposing counter magic" regardless.

The kill is not irrelevant when you Will with a fat graveyard.  There are only a relative few ways to reliably win the game off a Will without letting your opponent have another turn.  I don't need to tell you how important that last phrase is in T1.  Even after a huge Will you will lose a lot of games if you pass the turn without killing your opponent.

Burning Wish gets played because it works with both the Tendrils kill and the Tinker kill to prevent having to pass the turn.  It also randomly fetches important effects from the sideboard and wins games that way.  Effectively, this makes it like 1/2 a slot for a win condition.  FlameVault uses 2 cards for one win condition, but it gets the ability to win without Rebuild or Will.

[Whatever Works]

Well written and interesting. The discussion reminds me of a conversation with Andy Probasco from a few days ago where the general theme was: "Dark Confidant didnt really impress me at all this weekend (richmond). I think I overrated the card ALOT."

It shutsdown drain mana, easy to remove, takes 2+ turns to become as good at a nights whisper etc...

Kyle L

[BigMac]

I think a lot of people underestimate the damage a Bob can do. When you play gifts it could be initial damage, next to the cards it could and will render when you protect it with your countermagic. People tend to think this format is defined by fast finishes.  It is defined by broken hands, card draw and deckbuilding.

Not to many people play creature removal anymore. This makes the whole, it only has 1 defense discussion, a little to much. More than not it will stay on the table long enough to get a good lot of cardadvantage. Sure you get damage of him. But as far as i know gifts plays a whole lot of Marna, sure you get damage, but not every turn. More than half the time you will draw into a mix or a land, or have a brainstorm to put the right card in place. You also have mystical and vampiric to make sure what card you get. So, even without the slow sensei there are enough ways to make sure you do not get to much damage out of Bob. As an example, i beat my opponent to death with 2 Bobs while at 1 and him on 20 with a bargain on the board as well. This means i beat him a full 5 turns while on 1 with drawing 2 cards every turn of them 2 Bobs. (had a lot brainstorms as well as sensei by that time)

A broken hand does not need Bob but that goes for every deck. That does not make Bob a bad card when in hand 1, it just means more choices. Do i want to play a little more conservative or do i want to go for the turn 1 kill. A broken hand is broken for two reasons. You put pressure on your opponent. Or you just straight out win. Either way, your opponent is in trouble.

Deckbuilding is a little more difficult as you need to decide what kind of deck you want to play in what kind of tournament. If it is a small tournament you can play a slow deck that gives you good even chances the whole tournament. If you play in a big tournament you can play a fast deck because it can give you fast wins which means you will have more energy later on, with the drawback it is less stable. With Bob i think you have the best of both worlds. It is a critter, so does damage which means a clock. It draws cards which generates cardadvantage which wins games. It can block which can give time to eventually win as it is still 1 for 1 meaning you do not have disadvantage.

People say it will not be advantageous after two turns. If your opponent does nothing to your Bob it will be an advantage or he has to win that turn. The next turn you are even card counting wise, if your opponent has taken care of Bob you do not have a disadvantage. Every turn Bob is on the table you have 1 card advantage. Even the second turn when you draw 1 and your opponent decides to get rid of him then. He will have used 1 card against your 2 (Bob and the drawn card) If your opponent counters him it is still 1 for 1. Together with the potential damage Bob can do i think this is a big threat any turn of the game. (off course i would want it turn 1 as well)

Concluding i think Bob could fit in any combo deck you can think off. Also combocontrol. You do have to think about the use of drains then, but even when you use drain i think it is a good card to play with it. Let them waste your underground sea. That normally means Bob stays on the table which means you draw an extra card and have a big chance on extra Marna. When people waste your Marna that usually means tempoloss for them as well.

I have played Bob on several occasions now and have yet to suffer my first loss due to him killing me. He more than not gives me games due to the draw engine you get. Sure every once and again that FoW was hurtfull, but look at the impact that card will have on your opponent. He now knows he has to play around a FoW. Do not underestimate the power of bluff.

I do think that Bob and manaleak have a more natural synergy than Bob and manadrain, but i think both can be combined with this very good card. The drawbacks are minor considering the advantages.