It's wild to me, that they reprinted Omniscience in Magic: the Gathering Foundations, but they did, so let's do our best to break it. The main goal of this deck is to cheat Omniscience out (possibly as early as turn four) and then combo kill our opponent with a loop that's only infinite if we don't have to spend mana for spells. Like so many of my decks, this deck requires a lot of setup, clever positioning, and plain-old good draws to be successful.
If you’re a fellow fan of glass cannon combos, I’ve got a good one for you today!
The Core Combo
Getting Omniscience onto the battlefield quickly is the primary goal. To that end, we're using Reenact the Crime which you might remember from the Breach the Multiverse Conspiracy Unraveler days. We're doing basically the same thing here with cards that fill our graveyard for minimal to no mana investment.
The surveil lands are clutch in this deck because a lucky top deck surveil can mean an Omniscience hitting the graveyard for zero mana at an opportune time. Making sure to save your surveil lands for times when you would have four mana up otherwise for Reenact is a good idea and can lead to some very unexpected explosive turns.
Collector's Vault might be the single most important card in this entire deck that isn't directly tied to the deck's main combo. It ramps us with treasures and gives us flexibility to place cards into our graveyard at specific times, and is the primary method by which we pull off turn four Omniscience. To tee that up, you'll need to play it on turn two, activate it on turn three, and save the treasure. By turn four, you'll have five mana available, spend two, gain one, and boom, you're Reenacting that Crime.
But How Does it Win?
I'm glad you asked that, hypothetical reader. Jace, the Perfected Mind is able to mill our opponent out as long as we can reset him repeatedly. Fortunately for us, a lot of good bounce spells are available in the format, such as Into the Roil and This Town Ain't Big Enough. Hit your opponent with Jace's -X ability selecting four, then bounce Jace back to hand and fire away again.
In order for that setup to go infinite, we'll need to recur the bounce spells in some way. Invasion of Arcavios gives us exactly that. It allows us to grab This Town Ain't Big Enough from our sideboard, which we can use to bounce both the invasion and Jace. Given that we're playing them both for free, we can start pulling This Town Ain't Big Enough from our graveyard with the invasion, and we have a bouncy infinite.
But How Does it Survive Aggro?
This question is one that has plagued combo players for ages, and with the recent popularity of the mice deck that can literally crunch you in the face for five damage before you untap a single land, it's only become more pressing. Fortunately for us, a lot of these red aggro decks are reliant on one or two large creatures, so interacting with a single creature can prevent a ton of damage in those critical early turns. We also have Unsummon back in Standard which brings me joy to no end.
The reason this deck uses Unsummon over Into the Flood Maw is because Unsummon gives us the ability to bounce our Atraxa, Grand Unifiers once we've established Omniscience to dig through our deck and nearly guarantee we get our combo. Note that Into the Flood Maw is in our sideboard for these matchups, though, so we can have eight one-mana bounce spells.
Aetherize can also be fantastic once our opponents have set up a wide board. Given that our deck will win on the spot, this card simply buying time is enough. We don't need to deny their resources if we can simply survive until we hit the Omniscience.
Why Mono Blue?
This deck is a mono blue deck with a splash, and like most great deckbuilding decisions, it started by simply seeing if I could do it. Lacking removal from black or white does make the deck play differently from other decks that are popular right now, but the mana base never struggling to cast Reenact the Crime is critical for the deck's success.
Not adding other colors also meant we could include Flow of Knowledge to make sure our hand is constantly full. Omniscience is a card that reads like it should win the game on the spot, but it only does so if you have spells to cast. I've sat on Omniscience on the board before without any follow-up spells and, frankly, it's embarrassing. I wanted to make sure that didn't happen here.
Okay, okay, the deck does have a splash for a very splashy card that requires four colors. Atraxa, Grand Unifier is a phenomenal card draw powerhouse that doesn't require her colors to show up early. Since Collector's Vault produces treasure tokens, we can still cast Atraxa in a pinch. The main reason for her, though, over something like Season of Weaving or a fourth copy of Flow of Knowledge is that she's a good target for Reenact the Crime in games when Omniscience isn't available. If we simply don't draw the enchantment, reenacting Atraxa can stabilize the board and draw us into the combo. Some decks are built specifically to get a turn four Atraxa online, whereas for us, that's our backup plan.
So, is it Good?
This deck has gone through a lot of iterations, with Invasion of Arcavios being the latest addition to the deck and, in my opinion, it's performing significantly better as a direct result. This type of deck struggles when playing against a deck with counterspells, but in the current meta where creature destruction is prioritized, it can land a lot of favorable matchups. Against aggro and midrange decks that don't interact with the stack, this deck is pretty solid. If Dimir continues dominating the format, it might end up relegated to meme status, but for now, I think it's a solid off-meta choice.
Thanks for reading, and happy brewing!