A Compleat History of the Magic: the Gathering Metagame, Chapter 19: Three Stories about Kamigawa Block
Last time: I wrote a short history of Affinity, the most broken deck since Urza's Saga.
Wizards followed up Mirrodin block with Kamigawa block – Champions of Kamigawa, Betrayers of Kamigawa, and Saviors of Kamigawa.
This block is near and dear to the hearts of most people who care intensely about Magic. It sold poorly due to a combination of the hangover from the broken Mirrodin environment and Kamigawa itself having serious design flaws – many point to Saviors as the worst-designed Magic set of all time. It did, indeed, have its share of bad mechanics and bad cards. But while Kamigawa block is often compared to Masques – the underpowered follow-up to a broken block – in reality it contained some very powerful cards. This is the story of the three most powerful cards in each of these sets: Gifts Ungiven, Umezawa's Jitte, and One With Nothing.
Failure to find
A few chapters back I wrote a whole chapter about Fact or Fiction.
Every important card in the history of Magic spawns descendants, imitations, riffs, variants; the game is constantly recycling itself for more content. Gifts Ungiven is one of Fact or Fiction's descendants – probably the greatest one. It's also descended from a Tempest card you might remember from earlier, Intuition.
The text of Gifts Ungiven is almost identical to Intuition:
Search your library for up to four cards with different names and reveal them. Target opponent chooses two of those cards. Put the chosen cards into your graveyard and the rest into your hand. Then shuffle.
Intuition was a rather disappointing card – powerful, but uninteresting. It was used to get three copies of the same card, rendering the opponent's choice a non-choice. Gifts is a correction to this mistake; in exchange for giving you card advantage – letting you keep two cards out of the pile, rather than just one – it forces you to pick four different cards.
This makes Gifts one of the most beautiful deckbuilding restrictions in the game. Like Fact or Fiction, Gifts is a spike-y skill-testing card. Unlike Fact or Fiction, it's skill-testing during deckbuilding. Gifts encourages building decks with lots of one-ofs and cards with dual or overlapping functions.
There's a science to building Gifts piles; with the correct cards in the deck stacked correctly, you can completely deny the opponent's choice. You can go for redundancy, picking up three or four of the same kind of effect – thus ensuring you'll get one. You can go for value, picking up piles of cards that are as good from the graveyard as they are from your hand, such as ones with the Flashback mechanic. You can go for surety, including some kind of Regrowth effect in your pile to have the option to pick up the cards your opponent put into the graveyard.
Gifts did not immediately take the Magic world by storm. Like other Kamigawa cards, it was initially overshadowed by the broken Affinity metagame; even after that, it was overshadowed by Umezawa's Jitte. But Gifts would become a perennial lurker, a card that does something utterly unique which would be leveraged, again and again, in formats that it was legal in. It quickly became a staple of Vintage; when the Modern format came into being, it would find a home there too, for a time.
In Standard, though, the furthest someone ever got registering a Gifts decklist was Frank Karsten:
This is a very unusual deck that Karsten himself designed. The basic game plan is:
- Get Yosei into play, either by casting it from the hand or by reanimating it with Goryo's Vengeance.
- Sacrifice Yosei to Greater Good, drawing cards to dig towards another Goryo's Vengeance or Yosei.
To survive to cast its combo, this deck uses powerful mana acceleration that was available at the time – which is why the base color here is green – and Wrath of God; aggressive creature strategies were everywhere in this metagame.
What's impressive is that while this is basically the first really successful Gifts deck in premier play, it's also a very advanced one; it squeezes every bit of juice out of that card.
- You can gifts for pure card advantage to further the control plan: Get Putrefy, Last Gasp, Kagemaro, and Wrath of God.
- You can use Reclaim and Recollect to fill out Gifts piles and ensure you get what you want; a very common pile would be Reclaim, Recollect, Yosei, Goryo's Vengeance – which guarantees you can either cast Yosei or Goryo's it back.
- Finally, in certain situations, you can fail to find.
I have to call out failing to find because it's one of the most famous rules interactions in the history of the game.
Magic's rules need an escape valve for when you search for a card with a specific quality but there's no card to go get; like cracking a Flooded Strand with no Plains or Islands left in your deck. It would be a waste of time to have to prove that there's no card left in your deck to go get; for the sake of expediency, a player always has the option to fail to find – to get nothing rather than something.
With Gifts, 'four cards with different names' is a specific quality of a card that you can fail to find – after all, maybe the rest of your library is all Islands. The rules don't care about whether that's actually true; you always have the option of 'failing' to find. So, much like a pitcher intentionally walking a power hitter, or a basketball team intentionally fouling at the end of a game, a Magic player can Gifts and find only one or two cards. Because of how Gifts is worded, those two cards then immediately go to the graveyard. In essence, you can cast Gifts as a double Entomb.
The Greater Gifts deck does this to get a dragon in the graveyard to reanimate with Goryo's Vengeance, in situations where it's either unable to cast the dragon, or casting the dragon wouldn't be winning.
This interaction leads to one of the greatest tournament moments in the history of the game: Frank Karsten winning the semi-finals at Worlds 2005.
Karsten's opponent Akira Asahara has just resolved the centerpiece of their deck, Enduring Ideal. For the rest of the game, they're going to search their library for an enchantment and put it into play; Yosei's death trigger can't do anything to them. Karsten has a Yosei in hand, but if he just casts it, Asahara will then go get Confiscate and take it. Karsten needs a dragon in his graveyard – so, on the highest stage possible, he fails to find and introduces this obscure rules interaction to the entire Magic world.
Equip Jitte, attack
When Umezawa's Jitte was previewed, it was largely ignored by the Magic world at large. People were used to evaluating equipment in a world of Skullclamp and Cranial Plating.
Jitte is one of the more deceptive cards in Magic; it reads like it should be fine. In the abstract none of the abilities seem that powerful, and it needs a lot of setup – what do you mean I need to equip this on a creature and attack with it before I get value from this card?
In reality, Jitte might as well read 'win every combat step, forever.' It is one of the most game-warping cards in Magic. If Jitte is in play, every decision is now about Jitte. When people played with Jitte during Betrayers of Kamigawa prerelease events, they quickly realized that the card was a lot more powerful than it seemed when you were just casually reading it.
Part of what allowed Jitte to fly somewhat under the radar initially is that players were a little late to realize how much creature combat actually mattered. In Magic's early days, creatures were very bad, and only a handful of true aggro decks were really interested in attacking with creatures. As a result, blocking didn't happen all that much in Constructed.
But Wizards always considered creatures the fundamental core of the game, and so they gradually pushed them to fit that level of importance. Creatures got better, and better, and better, undergoing noticeable power creep. Consider the history of 3/3 creatures for 2 mana:
- In the early days, those creatures had brutal drawbacks to 'balance' being undercosted relative to the benchmark of a 2/2 for 2. Spectral Bears, from Homelands, can usually only attack every other turn.
- Compare its drawback to Mogg Flunkies, from Stronghold. The drawback is tuned so that the undercosted body is a reward for playing a certain strategy (attacking with lots of small creatures).
- And then, in Ravnica, the set right after Kamigawa block, there's Watchwolf. Just a straight-up 3/3 for 2 mana, no text. Yes, being a multicolored card is something of a drawback, but a very small one.
Creatures have gotten even better since then, and Watchwolf isn't playable in any format it's legal in. But this time, around 2005, was an era where creature strategies were becoming the norm, and creature interaction was becoming very important, but players hadn't quite caught on to all the implications of that. Hence, the slight slowness in figuring out how powerful Jitte was.
Of course, when Jitte's power became clear, it put the format in a headlock. That tournament Frank Karsten went second in with his Gifts deck? He had the only three copies of Gifts. Akira Asahara had the only four copies of Enduring Ideal. Marcio Carvalho was playing a blue control deck. The other players in the top 8? 17 copies of Jitte among the five of them. Including, of course, the winner.
Glare of Subdual is no Opposition, but as creatures become more and more important, it gets closer and closer to being just as good. This is a creature deck that's trying to dominate the board by using Glare to control other creature decks; against the few non-creature strategies, it can lean on an aggressive game plan or on disruption through Seed Spark.
Part of what's notable about this as a 'Jitte deck' is how really, it's just a deck with lots of creatures and Jitte is an automatic include. It doesn't have to do anything to make Jitte good, and it has no particular Jitte synergies. The synergy is that if you have Jitte, you win every combat step.
Jitte's other role in this deck was to counter opposing Jittes.
Magic has had several version of what 'legendary' means over the years. Originally, if a legendary card was in play, you couldn't play another copy at all. This exactly fit the fiction that the card represented a specific person or thing, but it was incredibly frustrating in actual play.
Kamigawa block had legendary creatures as one of its themes, and so it prompted an update to the rule. Now, if two legendary cards with the same name are in play, they both immediately get sent to the graveyard. This essentially meant that legendary cards could act as a removal spell for opposing copies of themselves; and so, one way to deal with opposing Jittes was to play your own Jitte.
This, of course, only made the card even more centralizing, leading to even more Jittes being played, leading to more Jittes being played to destroy opposing Jittes.
"Print this bad boy"
One with Nothing is an instant for one black mana. It reads:
Discard your hand.
There's not trick or secret to it; that's just what the card does. It's widely regarded as one of the worst cards in Magic's history. Finding this as the rare in your booster pack surely soured many players' opinions of Saviors of Kamigawa.
But but few cards have wormed their way into player's heads as much as One with Nothing. One with Nothing is not powerful as a game piece, but it is immensely powerful as a shitpost. Almost every rare from Saviors is forgettable. One with Nothing is anything but forgettable.
There's a perverse, desperate desire to make One With Nothing good. Maybe you can discard a bunch of cards with Madness. Maybe you use it to get yourself Hellbent in a flash.
Of course, none of those use cases are actually playable. One with Nothing is utterly, completely unplayable. To have an excuse to play One with Nothing, you'd need some kind of utterly bizarre corner case, a true black swan event of a situation.
This deck, known as 'Owling Mine', is one of the most notorious rogue decks in Magic history. A rogue deck is a deck that aims to win not by playing the best cards available, but by finding some strategy that specifically attacks whatever's popular in a metagame. In 2006, when Kamigawa block and its successor Ravnica block were in standard, the metagame was chock full of bouncelands.
Ravnica block, composed of the sets Ravnica: City of Guilds, Guildpact, and Dissension had a multicolor theme similar to Invasion. To support that, it needed a lot of dual lands that could enable decks that played lots of colors. At rare, they had the 'shocklands' – lands that come into play tapped unless you pay 2 life. To this day, the shocklands are a staple in every format they're legal in where the Alpha dual lands aren't available.
Because they have the basic land types, like the original duals – that is, Hallowed Fountain is an actual Plains Island – they interact with a lot of cards that other dual lands over the years don't interact with.
But Ravnica block also needed a cycle of dual lands at common, for Limited play and casual players. This cycle was known as the Bouncelands.
Like other common duals, the bouncelands can never come into play untapped. Unlike other common duals like the cycle of dual taplands printed recently, the bouncelands provide a huge advantage in other ways.
You see, because a bounceland taps for two mana (but returns one other land to your hand), a starting hand with a bounceland and another land is kind of like a hand with three lands. They provide a sort of virtual card advantage that greatly smoothes over the mana variance of the game. This made them perennially popular with casual players, and it also made them very relevant in Constructed. This was aided by a general tendency, in this particular Standard, towards somewhat slower decks.
And thus, Owling Mine was born. This is essentially the same strategy as the Black Vise decks that were popular 10 years prior. Ebony Owl Netsuke is no Black Vise, but that's fine – opponents don't have access to Force of Will or Necropotence either.
Boomerang and Eye of Nowhere can bounce opposing lands, setting the opponent back a turn; against any deck that's not playing cheap threats, this disruption allows the Owling Mine player to play Howling Mines, clogging both players' hands with cards. Remand, a multi-format all-star, prevents the opponent from even resolving permanents that might do something before being sent back to the hand. Like the classic Vise deck, this deck turns card advantage on its head, weaponizing the opponent's cards in hand against them.
But... what if you could just discard your hand. Maybe at instant speed, in response to a Sudden Impact. What if you could let them just run out of Boomerang effects, claw back some kind of board presence, and eventually play a threat and win. Maybe One with Nothing out of the sideboard could be a way to beat Owling Mine?
And so, the legend goes that One with Nothing heroically strode into Pro Tour Honolulu as secret, powerful sideboard tech against specifically this deck. This is... something of an exaggeration.
Exactly three copies of One with Nothing were registered during that Pro Tour; two by Stephan Meyer and one by Tobias Henke. So while the sideboard tech story is true, this was never widespread even at the peak of Owling Mine's popularity, and it is unclear (without doing a lot of further research) whether any Ones with Nothing were actually cast during the tournament, or whether they helped. Neither player made the top 8; in fact, neither player had a good enough record to cash out at the tournament.
But One with Nothing, Magic's 'best worst card,' lives on rent-free in players' heads. Brian Tinsman, one of Magic's (then) developers, famously tried to kill it. In the development notes for the card set, he went as far as:
If this sees print as is, I'm going to pound my forehead against a cement wall until I get a little scab.
Obviously he didn't get his wish. Aaron Forsythe, who'd go on to be head of Magic development, responded with:
Print this bad boy.
Elsewhere in Magic
- By necessity, I jumped ahead a bit into Ravnica-era Standard with this post, but I will talk more properly about Ravnica and its cards in the next installment.
- That Enduring Ideal deck was absolutely wild; you can see the full list along with other top 8 decks from Worlds 2005.
- Magic youtuber Rhystic Studies did some really good essays on both Gifts Ungiven and One with Nothing. Kamigawa really is a fan favorite among a certain kind of player.
- I haven't touched much on Vintage, but that's really the format where Gifts Ungiven had the most impact. Here's some 2015 video of pro player Luis Scott-Vargas playing a Vintage Gifts deck to give you a sense of how the card plays. When the Modern format came out, it was also tried in many different shells in that format – here's LSV again with a quirky variant.
Next time
What if I didn't cast any spells?