Gifts Ungiven has recently been unbanned in Commander, so it’s high time we cover how to play with the card. Today we’ll look at covering how many cards to search for, what types of cards to find, and powerful combo lines – including what’s available in cEDH.
GIFTS UNGIVEN
Gifts Ungiven is an instant speed tutor effect. You can search your library for four cards with different names and reveal them. An opponent (though usually, in Commander, a group discussion) decides which two go to your hand and which to the yard. In a lot of ways, it’s like a Fact or Fiction.
The practical application for this card is usually to assemble a combo, whether an infinite, or just very strong synergy between multiple cards.
It’s also similar to a reserved list card, Insight, but Gifts Ungiven is a lot better for just one mana more. It lets you get an additional card. It also lets you do a weird little trick because of how the rules of the game work, which makes it better than Insight in another way.
YOU CAN GET FEWER THAN FOUR CARDS WITH GIFTS UNGIVEN
One thing to keep in mind with Gifts Ungiven is that you are allowed to search for as many cards as you want. That’s because it asks you to find “up to four cards with different names”. So if you find three, you’ll be given one to hand. If you get two, both will go to the graveyard.
You can choose to find fewer than four cards if you want. If you find one or two cards, your opponent must choose for them to be put into your graveyard, even if they don’t want to.
(2017-03-14)
Where this gets interesting is with cards with Flashback.
If you grab a card like Unburial Rites and a haymaker like Elesh Norn, Jin-Gitaxias, or Valgavoth, Terror Eater, you can rest assured that both end up in the yard, ready for you to reanimate to your heart’s content.
This works with other flashback cards too, and when you’re looking to put together a pile of four cards with Gifts Ungiven, you absolutely should be including one.
MAKE SURE YOUR FOUR CARDS INCLUDE RECURSION
If you ensure that you have recursion amongst the four cards you’re choosing, you’re going to be able to develop a set of four cards that provides opponents with a “lose-lose” situation… which is win-win for you!
Cards like Past in Flames, Underworld Breach and Sevinne’s Reclamation are great for this, as are staples like Eternal Witness, Snapcaster Mage, and Reanimate.
It’s essential to add these kinds of cards into Gifts piles to make sure you can achieve your goals.
EXAMPLES GIFTS UNGIVEN PILES
Let’s look at a few ways to use Gifts Ungiven. The first one is what I’d like to call the “Innocent Gifts” pile. Say you’re in Azorious, and you’re looking for ways to ramp. You can use Gifts Ungiven to get a Lotus Field, a Sevinne’s Reclamation, a Knight of the White Orchid, and then any other card – it could be a Brought Back, a mana rock, or a draw engine.
Whatever way this shakes down, you’re going to end up with Sevinne’s Reclamation in your hand or the yard, and the ability to bring back two or three permanents. This kind of “Value” Gifts play isn’t one I’m too hot on, because it’s investing a lot of resources to achieve something you can achieve with other cards.
The main casual Gifts pile is going to look like a series of answers to a problem on the table, along with some ways to ensure that you get to use said answers. This might be some board wipes alongside a Snapcaster Mage or Eternal Witness, for example.
What most people actually want to use Gifts for, though, is to combo. By putting an opponent in a “damned if they do, damned if they don’t” kind of bind. And for that, we turn to cEDH.
GIFTS UNGIVEN IN CEDH
We’ve already had a Gifts analog in cEDH for a while: Intuition.
The common Intuition pile involves Sevinne’s Reclamation, Underworld Breach, and Lion’s Eye Diamond. No matter which card your opponent gives you, you can pull of the infinite loop. You still need an out to win here, like a Brainstorm – but its a way to get this multi card combo assembled quickly.
By using Gifts Ungiven, you can now have redundancy for this effect, while grabbing another useful card.
RogSi decks (Rograkh and Silas Renn) are the decks poised to make the best use out of Gifts Ungiven. An example pile is Thassa’s Oracle, Demonic Consultation, Reanimate, and Snapcaster Mage.
Whichever piece ends up in the yard, you’ll have a recursion piece to grab the other half.
Other colors and Commanders can get in on the action, too. Thrasios Tymna has access to WUBG colors of mana.
You can use Sevinne’s Reclamation and Hazel’s Brewmaster as your “recursion” pieces, with Swift Reconfiguration and Devoted Druid. Either way you get given two cards, you’re going to be able to make the infinite mana with Devoted Druid. You either turn it into a vehicle, or you exile it with the Brewmaster to make a Food token. You can even get the Druid into the yard yourself through playing it and activating its untap ability, to get it back off of Sevinne’s Reclamation with Swift Reconfiguration.
Both Tivit can use Gifts Ungiven in their lines too. Tivit can use Sevinne’s Reclamation in conjunction with Time Sieve, and then pick two pieces of relevant interaction – whether counterspells or Grand Abolisher effects.
What we can learn from these lines is that they either seek to get a combo going with Gifts Ungiven and use the Commanders for their colors (and in RogSi’s case, the chance to use Fierce Guardianship and Deflecting Swat easily), or they look for a Gifts pile that synergizes with the Commander to combo off.
Being a Game Changer, Gifts Ungiven is likely to only show up in Optimized (Bracket 4) in any real quantities. That’s because Upgraded (Bracket 3) games still advise a more chill approach than tutoring for a combo to win the game. Given that, it’s likely you’ll want to approach playing it in a somewhat similar way to the cEDH decks that play it.
END STEP
Gifts Ungiven is a fun card, and the table politics and interactiveness of it makes it that much more fun in Commander. While you can use it to find answers or reanimate a haymaker, it’s going to do the most work enabling combos.
Whichever way you slice it, Mistrise Village might be worth a look to back up your Gifts Ungiven sequences. It’s a spicy way to make sure one of your spells definitely goes through.
Kristen is Card Kingdom’s Head Writer and a member of the Commander Format Panel. Formerly a competitive Pokémon TCG grinder, she has been playing Magic since Shadows Over Innistrad, which in her opinion, was a great set to start with. When she’s not taking names with Equipment and Aggro strategies in Commander, she loves to play any form of Limited.