There's nothing I like more in Modern than a good, old-fashioned Gifts Ungiven. Not the kind the Storm decks leverage, where you're just stocking your graveyard with combo fodder. I'm looking for Gifts Ungiven piles that grind opponents into the dust; the kind featuring three different Wrath of Gods or Snapcaster Mage and Eternal Witness plus disruption elements. It's been a long time since that style of Gifts Ungiven deck was viable in Modern, but I'm excited to see TheRiedl giving it a shot:

Esper Gifts | Modern | TheRiedl, 31st Place Modern Challenge

• Creatures (4)
• 1 Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite
• 3 Snapcaster Mage

• Planeswalkers (3)
• 1 Teferi, Hero of Dominaria
• 2 Jace, the Mind Sculptor

• Instants (16)
• 1 Mana Leak
• 2 Cryptic Command
• 2 Fatal Push
• 2 Logic Knot
• 2 Spell Pierce
• 3 Gifts Ungiven
• 4 Path to Exile

• Sorceries (11)
• 1 Collective Brutality
• 1 Lingering Souls
• 1 Supreme Verdict
• 1 Thoughtseize
• 1 Timely Reinforcements
• 1 Unburial Rites
• 1 Wrath of God
• 4 Serum Visions

• Enchantments (2)
• 2 Search for Azcanta

• Lands (24)
• 1 Island
• 1 Plains
• 1 Swamp
• 2 Snow-Covered Island
• 1 Celestial Colonnade
• 1 Creeping Tar Pit
• 1 Glacial Fortress
• 1 Godless Shrine
• 1 Marsh Flats
• 1 Watery Grave
• 2 Hallowed Fountain
• 3 Field of Ruin
• 4 Flooded Strand
• 4 Polluted Delta

• Sideboard (15)
• 2 Celestial Purge
• 2 Damping Sphere
• 1 Duress
• 1 Engineered Explosives
• 1 Inquisition of Kozilek
• 1 Iona, Shield of Emeria
• 2 Jace, Vryn's Prodigy
• 1 Negate
• 2 Surgical Extraction
• 1 Thoughtseize
• 1 Timely Reinforcements

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The big difference is how this deck pivots in the mid game using Gifts Ungiven. As soon as your opponent takes a turn off, you can resolve a Gifts Ungiven to break the game open. If you're playing against a humans board that's gotten out of control, you can get a pile that includes multiple sweepers and Snapcaster Mage to ensure that they won't get out of hand again. You can also just get Unburial Rites and Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite to lock creature decks out of the game. You can even get piles that include cards like Timely Reinforcements, Lingering Souls, and Snapcaster Mage to help you stall out the ground really hard.

Against combo decks, you have the ability to get Gifts piles full of disruption, such as Thoughtseize, Collective Brutality, Snapcaster Mage, and Logic Knot or Spell Pierce. Against control decks, you can just go for the value Gifts plan of getting another Gifts, Cryptic Command, and maybe some additional counterspells, or a Search for Azcanta, or some of your creature lands that are difficult to interact with.

As long as you have the time to cast Gifts Ungiven, this card gives you an enormous advantage in metagames where you can accurately predict what kinds of piles you need to be able to make. It does my heart good to see Gifts Ungiven being played in fair decks every now and again, and if your metagame is mostly midrangey creature decks and control decks, TheRiedl is showing that it's definitely possible to build Gifts Ungiven piles that bury these strategies in value.