gifts is back

[gold eyes]

   Thanks to the admins for helping me to realise my mistakes, I do want to be able to help the community so im going to take another crack at a previous post, How ever before I start i would just like to say that the last warning came off as quite rude to me and I ask that anything that may happen in the future is dealt with politely.

   The idea behind this deck is to mimic the old power of unrestricted gifts. I am trying to do this through the use of intution which is generaly worse than gifts but can do many the same things, as well as a few things that gifts can not do. So to start we must look at why gifts is good. The ability to search four restricted cards and get two of them is the most obvious, Now lets look at some of the others. Gifts was able to find piles that if you had  an advantage could just push you way into the lead. An example would be gifts for duress,thought seize, force of will , mana drain. This is not the most exciteing set of cards but getting at least two cards that will slow down the opponent. Other piles could be pure card advantage such as Ancestral recall, jace, fact or fiction, gush.

   So now that why gifts was so strong has been said we need to talk about why intution can mimic gifts. Again lets start with the most obvious it can get three broken cards, While true that tradeing intution for one restricted card is not nearly as good as getting two it is almost always good enough to be worth it, And of course there are cards that can reverse this anyway yawg will, regrowth, recoup ect. So now im going to talk about how you can just win, So there was the classic pile with gifts that was tinker,time walk,yawg will, recoup/ regrowth. So the idea is that you could just tinker and timewalk and swing, intution can do the same thing except from personal experiance reoup is better because it lets you get every thing, Time vault would be easier to put together nowadays.

   The difference is clear now and yes intution is weaker but is it really so much weaker that it cant do nearly the same things? It can also do somethings that gifts cant, finding three of the same cards can be very important depending on the situtation. There have been many times when i have cast intution to get 3 mana drain and it has saved me from dieing on the spot. Also we can run AK with intution. Now normaly i am not a fan of this card, but in decks that would run intution anyway such as the gifts style deck i am describing it becomes more apealing because we are doing the reverse of the normal thing. Alot of deck that run AK run intution to grab Ak but the ability to get three cards is powerfull enough on its own that gifts style decks could run it evenn if Ak did not exist. In closeing i made a list that can use intution as a very powerfull tutor engine and does much of what i described above ( this deck is designed for a local meta where MUD is underplayed and blue based is the norm)

4 force of will
4 mana drain
3 intution
4 accumalated knowledge
2 jace tms
ancestral recall
brainstorm
mystical tutor
chain of vapor
vampiric tutor
skeletal scrying
voltaic key
merchant scroll
timewalk
demonic tutor
ancient grudge
recoup
regrowth
time vault
tinker
yawgmoths will
gifts ungiven
fact or fiction
myr battle sphere

sol ring
mana vault
mana crypt
lotus
5 moxs
mox opal

LOA
tolarian academy
4 underground sea
tropical island
volcanic island
2 islands
2 misty rainforest
2 scalding tarn

This deck can pull way ahead very earily runs slightly more artifact mana than normal and can set up stage wins where you may have to take 2 turns to put everything together but is quite difficult for another player to fight through. There is no sb posted because agin this is a local meta deck but it does have forest,mountian 3 grudge and a rebuild for mud which is by far the worse match up. hope this is up to TMD standards and i hope people will share there thoughts on either the idea of mimicing gifts or the deck list.

[PETER FLUGZEUG]

Gifts is terrible as a one of, just play intuition if youre that into it

also still gifts obviously because its awesome

Dear Bun
I don't think this is the kind of criticism gold eyes was asking for. First, there is next to no content in your post.
Second, the two sentences contradict each other in a way that makes it impossible to find out, what you wanted to say.
gold eyes starts his deck idea with an explanation: He wanted to lay out his points clearer than in his last thread, which was admittedly not up to the quality we expect here at TMD.
Please try to either respond with a post that's actually useful, or do not respond at all. Thank you.

Dear gold eyes
Well done, you improved your idea and your post a lot, compared to the last one.
If you want to further improve your post, maybe you could provide us with more insight, such as previous deckslists, which cards are changed now, etc. Links to previous threads would be nice, too. Often, the same arguments are brought up again and again in various topics, when they could just be read elsewhere.

1- You like 4xGifts.dec – Which decks do you have in mind? Meandeck gifts, or others? (previous decks, discussion threads, etc. would go here: the backgorund of your idea.) for example: http://www.starcitygames.com/php/news/article/9963.html
2- You want to replace gifts with intuition. Therefore, you explained the differences between intuition and gifts:
    Gifts: Card advantage, search for 1ofs only // Intuition: No Card advantage, able to search for multiples. This is well done.
3- Before building a deck yourself (not to discourage deckbuilding! It is a good thing! BUT): Look for other decks that have tried to go your route, or are similar.
    decks/threads/discussion that come into my mind:
http://www.themanadrain.com/index.php?topic=39374.0 - The thread is called bombergifts. "But that's another deck!" You might say. Yes, it is another deck, with cards that can be seen as whacky or crappy even, but it has had a lot of success and the most important part (in this context) is: The thread poster tried to analyze the loss of merchant scroll and 3 gifts: To quote kalisia:
"The restriction of Gifts Ungiven has, in the mind of many players, sealed and even killed the Gifts.decks era. That is the impression we may have if we look at the top8 tournaments results. The card itself continues to be heavily played in the blue-based deck, which seems logical if we note the natural power of the card. As Steve Menendian says, Gifts Ungiven, even alone, is a « game winner » (almost at the same level than Yawgmoth’s Bargain for example). But, we didn’t see any deck trying to build its strategy principally around this card.
In my opinion, the concept was not dead, we just needed to find the cards who could replace those lost on the restriction.
Recoup was really so strong in a deck packing 4 Gifts Ungiven. But the fact is that in a list allowed to play only one copy of the blue instant, Recoup becomes almost awful, and the restriction of Scroll also hurts the deck.
The main idea concerning Gifts Ungiven has always been that, if Demonic Tutor is so broken while it’s Sorcery and it finds only one card, so a spell that is a quadruple tutor, blue and instant, should be completely amazing if we could minimize the impact of the opponent’s choice concerning the two cards we get in hand (...)"

Read that thread! It contains a lot of good thoughts and will be helpful for your concept! (Also, there are results with that deck from 2009 till now. See how it evolved!)
In that thread he explained various things which are important in your deck idea, too:

- if we replace gifts with intuition, what do we have to consider?
- What intuition piles can win your game, HOW MANY MANA DO YOU NEED FOR THAT ROUTE?

To give you some feedback on your specific deck:
This is a legitimate vintage deck, sure. It plays a lot of good cards. BUT:
You need about 1000 Mana for your deck to work. (Hyperbole.)

Let's break up your deck into what it does:

draw cards:
4x accumulated knowledge: 2 mana for a cantrip (BAD) / (2+3: intuition=5) mana for 3-4 cards (good)>> graveyard dependant: yes. Instant speed: Yes.
2x Jace: good card. 4 mana, sorcery speed.
fact or fiction: 4 Mana, instant.
Skeletal scrying: 3-xx mana, instant. eats your grave. good card, but as expensive as fact/gifts.
3x intuition: see above, can find your win.
1x gifts: finds your win.
these are good cards, but they are all expensive to cast. How do you defend against:
- Spell pierce? Other counters?

your disruption base:
4 Force of Will
4 Banana Drain
- Just compare this to other decks: how much disruption do they run? How fast are other decks?
- How do you want to resolve your big bombs?

Your mana base:
You run 4 colors. Analyse:
How many ways to find a red / green source do you have?
(Answer: 8, not counting tutors. That's rather low. 2 of them are: Lotus/mox opal.) How many ways to find their colors do other 4color decks have? --> Look at decklists!
How many lands do you run? 14, 1 of them only producing colorless mana. Your deck is mana intensive.
How many total mana? 24. That's rather low for a deck with mana hungry spells like yours.

One question for you: why the hell is recoup in your list? Please explain how many mana you need, what you find with it. If you do this, I hope you see that MAYBE there yould be other cards, that do more for you.

I hope this criticism was helpful for you. Please look at the threads I linked and analyse the points I brought up.

Kind regards,
Jonas
 

[bun]

Gifts is terrible as a one of, just play intuition if youre that into it

also still gifts obviously because its awesome

Dear Bun
I don't think this is the kind of criticism gold eyes was asking for. First, there is next to no content in your post.
Second, the two sentences contradict each other in a way that makes it impossible to find out, what you wanted to say.
gold eyes starts his deck idea with an explanation: He wanted to lay out his points clearer than in his last thread, which was admittedly not up to the quality we expect here at TMD.
Please try to either respond with a post that's actually useful, or do not respond at all. Thank you.

Yikes.  Yeah, drunk posting for the win.  :/

Anyway.

I think Intuition has some obvious potential as a Gifts replacement in certain circumstances, but I think it is a mistake to try and build around it as though it is the same card, because you'll just sell it short.  Obviously you can use it to make cool piles like with gifts, where they basically have no good option (Regrowth, Will, Recoup or something,) but the ability to just grab three of the same card is really strong.  It costs more than demonic tutor, and it can only reliably get cards you have at least three of, but the fact that the card basically reads as your choice of demonic on an unrestricted card or gifts -1 card is so good.  The fact that it costs less than gifts more than makes up for getting you one card instead of two, in my opinion, because often you just want one of the cards in the pile anyway.

Gifts should still almost definitely be run in a deck that runs intuitions, but just building your deck as gifts with intuition playing the role of gifts 2-5 is wasting its potential.  I think a deck actually built around the card (beyond just a few cute single card synergies, such as AK, recoup, will, etc) would be pretty powerful.  The problem with that is that anything I can think of off the top of my head just ends up losing to dredge (madness, for instance,) and I'm pretty sure intuition would not be all that great in dredge.

The only potentially techy suggestion I have is to try out Cunning Wish with Gifts.  4x Burning Wish used to find Will, maybe this will work too.  The question then becomes "is gifts worth 5UU and two cards?"  Maybe.  I think it might be worth testing, though, and since they have the same cost, it just jumps out at me whenever Intuition comes up as a replacement for gifts.

[Meddling Mike]

First off I want to say thanks for taking the time to put some more thought into the post. I hope you find the return for this extra effort to be worth the additional time.

I think Peter has sort of addressed some of the low-hanging fruit here. My first inclination is to cut out the red and green spells from the deck. Regrowth and Recoup work with some of the cards here nicely, but without 4 Gifts Ungiven available to you I can't see compromising the consistency of your mana base to make room for them. By cutting them we can make your mana base more consistent, more resistant to wasteland and probably add more blue spells for Force of Will. Ancient Grudge is a fine card, but it doesn't deal with the currently favored tinker target(Blightsteel Colossus) and might not be enough by itself to beat shops. In its stead I'd recommend Hurkyl's Recall. You're still running a fairly full tutor suite to get it even if it is not ideal with gifts or intuition.

With regards to the use of Intuition/AK engine, I think that The Atog Lord has written some excellent articles analyzing the engine. Although his articles focus on it's use in Control Slaver and are about 6 years old, I think that he makes many points that are still valid in this context.
http://www.starcitygames.com/php/news/article/8941.html
http://www.starcitygames.com/magic/vintage/9352_Spinning_the_Wheels_8212_A_Reflection_on_Optimizing_Intuition_Slaver.html

He eventually came to the conclusion that going for Deep Analysis with Intuition was preferable to AK, I can't think of any reason why his conclusions are not valid today.

[Mr. Type 4]

AK hogs deck space and is pretty marginal without having Intuition.  See Beyond or Impulse are a lot better in their raw form.  Still, if you run Intituion it makes sense that you'd want to be able to work it for card advantage, so I'd prob include 2 Analysis to generate a similar effect.  Bonus points for the times it shows up in a Fact or Fiction pile or when you'd have a chance to discard it.   With two freee slots you can get a lot of other good stuff going.

[gold eyes]

ok so it seems that everybody agrees that the green and red should be cut so i made the following changes.

-1 intution
-skeletal scrying
-ancient grudge
-recoup
-regrwoth
-fact or fiction
-tropical island
-volcanic island
-2 misty rainforest

+1 jace
+2 thought seize
+ imperial seal
+ grim tutor
+4 polluted delta
+1 swamp

So now that the mana base has been turned into only blue black we are less afraid of wastelands. The idea behind the change is to add more mana sources and tutors and cut down on the off colour and mana heavy cards. The reason behind adding the tutors is that if intution is not getting the win or Ak then you want tutors or mass card advantage. Intution can now find 3 jaces or three tutors and come ahead. i like imperial seal because the deck powers through its cards so fast that top deck tutors dont feel like card disadvantage, Grim tutor i still need to test but 2 colour mana base and able to get some amazing things sounds good to give it a test. The less colours the more focused we are so now there is room for 2 thought seize. DA i personaly jsut do not like because it loses life which is bigger now that we added 2 more lose life tutors and thought seizes plus its a sorcery which the only other draw spell that is in the deck is jace. I am going to try and put some match results up but it might be slow due to school mid terms, thanks for the advice all of you and i hope to get some on the new deck list. Also any opinions on me cutting fact and scrying? fact was hard but another jace seemed good and scrying well thats just a personal favorite and i actualy like it over thirst which has gotten some good disscusion with my play group.

[serracollector]

I personally would take out the Grim tutor, and put back in the Fact.  You can already grab seal, vamp, demonic, mystical, and if that fails you got merchant scroll too.  Also Fact can be played for U off drain mana, this is part of why it's so good. 

Otherwise looks nice.

not for your deck most likely, but I always thought it would be cool to EOT Intuition for Jace, Tezz, New Tezz, and wonder which they would let you keep.

Good luck, let us know your results.

[PETER FLUGZEUG]

Dear gold eyes, it seems to me that you are now basically just replacing some cards because others have said "recoup is bad". I wasn't just saying that. (you get the point). What i was suggesting was not to just cut some cards, but to analyse your engines. Have you read the bombergifts thread for example? I agree: the deck looks okay. My point is: WHY? ask yourself questions!

[Purple Hat]

http://www.themanadrain.com/index.php?topic=35989.msg500863#msg500863

This also might be of interest.  It uses intuition as a combo engine to build the graveyard for will, allowing you to use both halves of intuition.  One question you might want to consider is what the primary strategy of the deck will be.  Gifts was strong because it could change roles easily, but different versions played a more comboish or a more controlish main deck.

also, with vault key, does it make sense to play red for welder in some number to be able to intuition for vault/key for the win?  it also gives you the opportunity to fetch battlesphere with intuition and weld it back.  It could theoretically strengthen the stax matchup as well.

Regardless of what you decide, I think an intuition based deck needs to be able to use all the cards that get fetched with intution, whether that means flashback cards, welders or something else I don't know, but intuition gets 3 cards and you have to be able to use all of them to be effective.

[kalisia]

The link above shows basically the "Intuition-Tendrils" deck, popularized by Eric Becker.

And you current list, gold eyes, is becoming now a normal blue-black Drain-Tendrils list

Intuition-Tendrils was and still is a good deck, but the concept is different from Gifts decks. In this list, Intuition fills the graveyard in order to allow a big Yawgmoth's Will. Intuition doesn't win the game by itself. In a Gifts.deck, Gifts Ungiven, most of the time, WINS the game when it resolves, on the spot, or on the following turn.

This difference explains why Gifts Ungiven is restricted and Intuition is not.

If you want to build a "Gifts Ungiven" deck, don't play suboptimal cards like Intuition. Intuition will never replace Gifts, and is not even a good "Mini-Gifts-Ungiven".
I used to play Intuition as a one-of, and I finally concluded that the card is not strong enough on its own.

In other words, I would say "Gifts Ungiven is a BROKEN spell, and Intuition is a good spell".