Last updated on April 24, 2025
Gifts Ungiven | Illustration by D. Alexander Gregory
Perhaps some gifts truly are better left ungiven.
Now entirely in control of decision-making for Commander, WotC released its first real banlist changes to the format on Tuesday. Among the five cards converted to “Game Changer” status were a few banlist mainstays that WotC has decided finally deserve to be released into the wild. The 12 people excited about digging up old copies of Sway of the Stars have discovered a new-found purpose in life, and Coalition Victory has been given free rein to cheese out 5-color wins in casual pods.
But one of these things was not like the other. The banlist also released Gifts Ungiven from its shackles, which has a lot of Magic players scratching their heads and fearful of the card's new position in Commander.
Why Unban Gifts?
Nobody's really questioning the other unbans that hard, but Gifts Ungiven is a notoriously powerful card, and is arguably even better now than it was during its Constructed heyday.
Gifts Ungiven looks like a traditional “divvy” effect in the same vein as Fact or Fiction, but there's a stark difference between dividing up piles from among the top cards of your library and literally tutoring up four cards for your opponent to split up. Yes, the opponent has control over which two cards you pick up, but savvy players will know the power of Gifts is engineering situations where the opponent's decision doesn't matter.
Imagine your opponent end steps Gifts and shows you the following four cards:
What two cards do you put in your opponent's hand? You can't really let them have the two Time Walk effects, but ditching those leaves them with two recursion creatures that just pick the extra turn spells back up anyway. Leave them with the Time Warps and… well, your opponent has two Time Warps. There's no split here where the opponent doesn't eventually get their way.
Scenario #2: You're a creature deck that's dumped most of your hand on the table. Opponent shows you the following pile with their end step Gifts:
Whomp whomp. There's basically no way to come out on top here, even though you “have control” over what they get. Bin two board wipes, and the opponent still untaps with two in hand.
That's the power of Gifts Ungiven: In decks built with specific toolboxes of cards, especially recursive engines, the Gifts player can put together packages of cards that invalidate the opponent's input on the card.
Source: Rhystic Studies YouTube Channel
There's an even more diabolical way to use Gifts, and that involves “failing to find” the other two cards. It's totally legal to search up exactly two cards with Gifts Ungiven, and by default they'll just go to the graveyard. It's card disadvantage, but you set up your graveyard with whatever you need, kind of like a double-Entomb. Rhystic Studies covered this in a video essay about tutoring, where he highlights Frank Karsten using this trick to pull off a big-tournament win in 2005.
Justifying the Unban
Fact or Fiction | Illustration by Matt Cavotta
First, here's what WotC Principal Designer Gavin Verhey had to say about the card:
“If your deck is trying to infinite combo people with this, they should often help sort out if you are playing in the right environment. On the other hand, a fair Gifts Ungiven is very fun and akin to Fact or Fiction in the politics and interplay between players it can create.”
In other words, the Commander Format Panel‘s justification is that people using Gifts Ungiven for its full combo potential will weed themselves out during pre-game discussions. The Banned and Restricted Announcement acknowledges how powerful (and time-consuming) the card can be, but the impetus seems to be on players to use it “fairly” in lower Brackets. Notably, all cards unbanned in this wave were added to the Game Changers list, which automatically disqualifies the card from Brackets 1-2, and makes it less likely to show up in Bracket 3. Fair game anywhere else though, including cEDH!
One major factor that isn't mentioned in Gavin's article is the collusion angle: Players can team up to guarantee the player casting Gifts gets the two cards they want, which just makes the card double-Diabolic Tutor at instant speed (often better, assuming the cards in the graveyard matter. That's not cause enough to keep the card banned though (no one's clamoring for a Guided Passage banning), but it is another annoyance that comes up with a card that's already powerful without the political edge.
A New cEDH Staple?
Intuition | Illustration by April Lee
So assuming Gifts Ungiven doesn't completely ravage casual Commander, which is totally possible despite the wishes of the Format Panel, where does that leave the quadruple tutor in competitive EDH?
There's a hot discussion about the card's role in cEDH on Reddit, where u/JimmyHuang0917 posits that Gifts doesn't actually break much in the format, mostly due to the existence of Intuition already in the meta. Intuition #2 certainly isn't bad, but there's a good bit of back-and-forth about whether the Gifts unbanning really matters for cEDH.
As DeltaRay235 points out, there are auto-win piles that can be tutored up here, often involving Thassa's Oracle and reanimation spells. Being able to set this up on the end step before your turn is big game, though it remains to be seen how much of a player it'll be as a 4-mana spell in a format dictated by cheap, often free interaction.
And the Price?
After declining from its height of popularity in 2015-2016 Modern, the card slowly dwindled in price, to roughly $2-3 for the better half of a decade. One B&R Announcement later and boom! Gifts Ungiven is now big money, with the cheapest version sitting at $18 (or still dirt cheap on the European market). Initial hype definitely hit this card the hardest among the unbannings, though it's unclear if it has any extra room to grow over the next week or so.
Those of you who spec'd on Gifts pre-announcement, congrats! Those of you with piles of Primeval Titans on your desk… maybe next time?
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