The Splendid Reclamation was here mostly for style points, and because it often goes (in my cube) in Depths/Stage combo decks. More realistically Gifts here would be fetching Raven's Crime, Worm Harvest, or Deep Analysis as the fourth card in the pile. I think it's not actually all that slow, though: presumably your control deck has been interacting early in the game, and I hardly think a turn 6 kill would be too slow. Most control decks don't have a turn 6 goldfish at all. I do think Splendid Reclamation is capable of powerful things, though, even if it is a little slow. For some rough proof of concept, I drafted this deck awhile ago and my cube is working toward more combo-oriented applications of the card.
General Making control decks more interesting
- Thread starter Dom Harvey
- Start date
Some environments naturally have "dumb" big bombs, and the gifts pile would probably be more suited to those environments. In my cube, for instance, you could search up (at zero additional cube space):
Or
It's like a strictly fair combo, but still allows for overly efficient plays where you could leave up mana leak along side the sphinx or something. How interesting it is is more up to the user, tbh. I think it's pretty interesting, and the slight tweak to deck layout to get incidental value off of Rites makes for a neat little flavor of control deck. Stuff like Fleshbag Marauder that might not normally make the cut, but get better with the repeated recursion. My take on it.
Edit: makes for some cool value piles too, like:
I should note I already have the Gifts-Rites package going and think it's cool with certain creatures. Just really, really not a fan of the Sphinx of the Final Word. Anyway it's pretty much always better to be digging up and building in more Gifts interactions. IMO Gifts is much less specialized of a card than it is in the MTGO cube and in most other cubes that play it--it's a really rich and interesting card that encourages interesting deckbuilding decisions, so I support it to the extent that I can (which is, as it turns out, pretty large. Gifts is super good and super flexible.)