So, a little bit of background first. This is actually the fourth version of the deck, and much better than the first three. Version 1 only ran one Omniscience and played it in the sideboard. You can imagine how poorly that turned out. Version 2 fixed that problem, but tried to use main deck Pause for Reflection, River's Rebuke, and Sleep to buy more time against creature decks alongside Syncopate and Sinister Sabotage. Unfortunately, the cards did very little to stop burn (which, playing on Arena, has a ridiculously huge presence) and I quickly learned that Shalai, Voice of Plenty stops you from using River's Rebuke and Sleep against them, which kind of undermines the point because all of the creature decks use Shalai. The counterspells also weren't great because I learned that casting expensive sorcery-speed ramp kept me from holding up mana for the counters. Version 3 streamlined the deck a bit. It cut the control elements and added more filtering to help find more ramp and combo pieces. The idea was that against aggressive decks, I should really just be trying to race them, which means that I'm generally looking to cast Omniscience (ideally) around turn 5-7. Unfortunately, I hadn't yet discovered Invert//Invent, so the deck was playing as a 3-card combo at that time. That... didn't work. I lost several games where I had 10 mana and two pieces, but just couldn't find the third. That's when I went looking for a way to turn the deck into a 2-card combo. And that's how I got to this build. Version 4. With that in mind...
@Shiftrex: Not yet. I have two games with this build (kind of hard to get matches instead of single games in Arena). The first game was a loss against burn where they drew the nuts (turn 1 Ghitu Lavarunner, turn 2 two more Lavarunners, turn 3 three Wizard's Lightning). The second game was a win against an Izzet Drake deck. They tapped out turn 6 for Ral, Izzet Viceroy and I comboed off the next turn. Since these were such extremely polarized games, and the sample size is so small, I can't really glean much from the results.
@darrenhabib: Interesting. I thought about playing this combo as just a win condition in a more established control deck, but I thought it was unrealistic to reliably get to ten mana with those decks and, even if I could, the decks really don't need a convoluted win condition like this when Teferi, Hero of Dominaria, Niv-Mizzet, Parun, or Nicol Bolas, the Ravager can get the job done much more easily. What I hadn't thought about was staying as a ramp deck but using the black splash to play a few control spells along the way. I like the idea, but I'm not sure how feasible it is to get multiple sources of black mana with only eight sources (none of which can be fetched with the ramp spells). Maybe cut one of each of the shocks for two swamps so that I can actually tutor for black mana? Come to think of it, that's probably just a good change to be making in general so that I can actually cast Mastermind's Acquisition before Omniscience comes down. I will say two things about the card draw. First, Flood of Recollection is a actually great in this deck. I agree with a later poster that Recollect is just better and that is a change I'll be making, but I don't think I want to cut the rebuy mechanic from the deck. Second, I initially had all of this card filtering because, for all of the previous versions of the deck, it was very difficult to get all of the cards I needed to combo off. Only running 1-2 copies of Omniscience, requiring three cards to combo off... These were problems that the extra draw helped fix. So that's why there's just so much of it in there. But, I agree with you that some of it can probably go now that I've gone up to 3 Omniscience and streamlined the combo.
@D90Dennis14: You're absolutely right about Recollect. Thank you for bringing that to my attention. Using that instead of Flood of Recollection also means I don't have to sideboard Enhanced Surveillance anymore, so that's a doubly-helpful suggestion. Mission Briefing actually doesn't work, because Omniscience only lets you cast cards for free if they're in your hand. I learned that one the hard way (that'll teach me to not read the card carefully before playing it).
@SpaciousBox: Thanks for the support and suggestions! I didn't know about Brass's Bounty. The reason I came to Omniscience in the first place was because I was looking for a way to deal with the problem of mana limitations. Brass's Bounty is certainly another way to do that. At this point, I think I'll stick with Sultai to keep developing this build. It might be worth splashing red for Lightning Strike, though. That's something I'll have to keep in mind when revising this further (after all, it's astoundingly easy to splash in a deck with so many land tutors). I've found the aggro meta to be a huge thorn in my side, as well. The upshot of this Omniscience build is that at least the life gain decks can never gain enough to get to the point where you can't kill them.
@everyone: Based on your suggestions, this is what I'm thinking now:
I'm also thinking about cutting down on blue mana sources now that the deck is more green focused. Any thoughts on this updated build?
Edit: I should also mention that changing Flood of Recollection for Recollect makes the maximum damage potential for the deck infinite. Use 2 copies to Recollect to infinitely rebuy each other and raise the storm count as high as you need it to be.
In case you couldn't tell, this is a combo deck built around Omniscience and Thousand-Year Storm. With the way the deck is built, you can combo off for obscene amounts of damage with two cards: Omniscience and Mastermind's Acquisition. Of course, in order to do that, you need to get to ten mana first and find those cards. That would be where the deck starts to run into problems.
So, here's how the combo works. Start with ten mana available and both combo pieces in hand.
1.) Cast Omniscience.
2.) Cast Mastermind's Acquisition and pull Invert//Invent out of your Sideboard with the wish mode. It is very important to pull the Sideboard version first. At this point, your pseudo-storm count is 1.
3.) Cast Invert//Invent for the Invent side and search your deck for a second copy of each of Mastermind's Acquisition and Invert//Invent. Your pseudo-storm count is now 2.
4.) Cast Mastermind's Acquisition as a wish again and fetch Thousand-Year Storm from your Sideboard. Storm count = 3.
5.) Cast Thousand-Year Storm.
6.) Cast Invert//Invent as Invent again. This time, Thousand-Year Storm will trigger and give you three extra copies. You only need to find your third Mastermind's Acquisition, so feel free to fetch any four Instants and any other three Sorceries you'd like. You can still do 36 damage with this combo even if you intentionally fail to find on everything except the Mastermind's Acquisition. After resolving your four Invent triggers, your psuedo-storm count will be 4.
7.) Cast Mastermind's Acquisition as a wish one last time. Thousand-Year Storm will trigger and give you four extra copies. Worth noting are two things. First, the trigger on Mastermind's Acquisition is mandatory, so you have to use all five copies. Second, the copies made by Thousand-Year Storm will be of the exact same mode as the original cast, so all five copies will fetch from your sideboard. With these five triggers, grab Inescapable Blaze and any other four cards from your sideboard. Storm count = 5.
8.) Cast Inescapable Blaze targeting your opponent. Thousand-Year Storm will make five extra copies which you can aim at your opponent's face, for a total of 30 extra damage, ending up at 36 with the initial spell factored in. This will increase by 6 for every other Instant or Sorcery cast on this turn, so with all of the extra triggers on Invert//Invent and Mastermind's Acquisition, you can really go off for enormous damage values. This is just the fastest way to get to lethal damage in a normal scenario.
So, what are the problems with this deck?
Well, for one, you need to survive until ten mana to cast Omniscience. This is the biggest and most obvious problem. There's basically no way for this deck to beat Mono-Red and it really struggles against other aggressive decks (though, unlike Mono-Red, they are beatable). The 4 Pause for Reflection in the sideboard help against Mentor and Token decks, but you're still highly unfavored. Pelakka Wurm is literally the only chance this deck has against burn; and, even then, 7 life only gets you so far.
The second biggest concern is countermagic. This deck plays no main-board counterspells of its own, so you have to rely on an opposing control deck either not having a counterspell for Omniscience or tapping out against you. The 4 Negate in the sideboard are supposed to help with this problem, as is the Carnage Tyrant, to give you an alternate win condition that can't be dealt with so easily.
The next problem is having all of your copies of Omniscience end up in the graveyard. Getting your other combo cards milled or discarded can be fixed with Flood of Recollection, but Flood can't pick an Enchantment back up. This is why I have the 1-of Enhanced Surveillance, to reshuffle if I lose too many crucial combo pieces.
Finally, Disperse is there to get rid of Shalai, Voice of Plenty or any other card giving the opponent hexproof before firing off the truly Inescapable Blaze.
Oh, I should also mention that the Black dual lands are there to let you cast Mastermind's Acquisition without Omniscience in play to find a tech card like Negate or Enhanced Surveillance game one, or to help you find Omniscience if you have two copies of Acquisition in hand. But, these are incredibly fringe scenarios and the life loss from the shocks is arguably enough of a downside that just running basics may be better. So, you know. Feel free to cut them if you're on a budget.
And that's it. That's my monstrous invention. What are your thoughts? Any ideas to improve it? Like I said, it's not great. But, it's really fun when it works, and it's surprisingly consistent (you know, when you aren't dying on turn 5).
@Shiftrex: Not yet. I have two games with this build (kind of hard to get matches instead of single games in Arena). The first game was a loss against burn where they drew the nuts (turn 1 Ghitu Lavarunner, turn 2 two more Lavarunners, turn 3 three Wizard's Lightning). The second game was a win against an Izzet Drake deck. They tapped out turn 6 for Ral, Izzet Viceroy and I comboed off the next turn. Since these were such extremely polarized games, and the sample size is so small, I can't really glean much from the results.
@darrenhabib: Interesting. I thought about playing this combo as just a win condition in a more established control deck, but I thought it was unrealistic to reliably get to ten mana with those decks and, even if I could, the decks really don't need a convoluted win condition like this when Teferi, Hero of Dominaria, Niv-Mizzet, Parun, or Nicol Bolas, the Ravager can get the job done much more easily. What I hadn't thought about was staying as a ramp deck but using the black splash to play a few control spells along the way. I like the idea, but I'm not sure how feasible it is to get multiple sources of black mana with only eight sources (none of which can be fetched with the ramp spells). Maybe cut one of each of the shocks for two swamps so that I can actually tutor for black mana? Come to think of it, that's probably just a good change to be making in general so that I can actually cast Mastermind's Acquisition before Omniscience comes down. I will say two things about the card draw. First, Flood of Recollection is a actually great in this deck. I agree with a later poster that Recollect is just better and that is a change I'll be making, but I don't think I want to cut the rebuy mechanic from the deck. Second, I initially had all of this card filtering because, for all of the previous versions of the deck, it was very difficult to get all of the cards I needed to combo off. Only running 1-2 copies of Omniscience, requiring three cards to combo off... These were problems that the extra draw helped fix. So that's why there's just so much of it in there. But, I agree with you that some of it can probably go now that I've gone up to 3 Omniscience and streamlined the combo.
@D90Dennis14: You're absolutely right about Recollect. Thank you for bringing that to my attention. Using that instead of Flood of Recollection also means I don't have to sideboard Enhanced Surveillance anymore, so that's a doubly-helpful suggestion. Mission Briefing actually doesn't work, because Omniscience only lets you cast cards for free if they're in your hand. I learned that one the hard way (that'll teach me to not read the card carefully before playing it).
@SpaciousBox: Thanks for the support and suggestions! I didn't know about Brass's Bounty. The reason I came to Omniscience in the first place was because I was looking for a way to deal with the problem of mana limitations. Brass's Bounty is certainly another way to do that. At this point, I think I'll stick with Sultai to keep developing this build. It might be worth splashing red for Lightning Strike, though. That's something I'll have to keep in mind when revising this further (after all, it's astoundingly easy to splash in a deck with so many land tutors). I've found the aggro meta to be a huge thorn in my side, as well. The upshot of this Omniscience build is that at least the life gain decks can never gain enough to get to the point where you can't kill them.
@everyone: Based on your suggestions, this is what I'm thinking now:
6 Forest
6 Island
2 Swamp
4 Hinterland Harbor
3 Overgrown Tomb
3 Watery Grave
Combo Pieces (9)
3 Omniscience
4 Mastermind's Acquisition
2 Invert//Invent
4 Llanowar Elves
4 Grow from the Ashes
2 Circuitous Route
Control Spells (5)
2 Ritual of Soot
3 Assassin's Trophy
Card Selection (12)
4 Recollect
4 Anticipate
4 Opt
1 Thousand-Year Storm
1 Invert//Invent
1 Inescapable Blaze
1 Disperse
2 Ritual of Soot
1 Assassin's Trophy
4 Negate
4 Duress
I'm also thinking about cutting down on blue mana sources now that the deck is more green focused. Any thoughts on this updated build?
Edit: I should also mention that changing Flood of Recollection for Recollect makes the maximum damage potential for the deck infinite. Use 2 copies to Recollect to infinitely rebuy each other and raise the storm count as high as you need it to be.
6 Forest
6 Island
4 Hinterland Harbor
4 Overgrown Tomb
4 Watery Grave
Combo Pieces (9)
3 Omniscience
4 Mastermind's Acquisition
2 Invert//Invent
4 Anticipate
4 Opt
3 Chemister's Insight
4 Flood of Recollection
Ramp (12)
4 Llanowar Elves
4 Grow from the Ashes
4 Circuitous Route
1 Thousand-Year Storm
1 Inescapable Blaze
1 Invert//Invent
4 Pause for Reflection
4 Negate
1 Enhanced Surveillance
1 Disperse
1 Carnage Tyrant
1 Pelakka Wurm
In case you couldn't tell, this is a combo deck built around Omniscience and Thousand-Year Storm. With the way the deck is built, you can combo off for obscene amounts of damage with two cards: Omniscience and Mastermind's Acquisition. Of course, in order to do that, you need to get to ten mana first and find those cards. That would be where the deck starts to run into problems.
So, here's how the combo works. Start with ten mana available and both combo pieces in hand.
1.) Cast Omniscience.
2.) Cast Mastermind's Acquisition and pull Invert//Invent out of your Sideboard with the wish mode. It is very important to pull the Sideboard version first. At this point, your pseudo-storm count is 1.
3.) Cast Invert//Invent for the Invent side and search your deck for a second copy of each of Mastermind's Acquisition and Invert//Invent. Your pseudo-storm count is now 2.
4.) Cast Mastermind's Acquisition as a wish again and fetch Thousand-Year Storm from your Sideboard. Storm count = 3.
5.) Cast Thousand-Year Storm.
6.) Cast Invert//Invent as Invent again. This time, Thousand-Year Storm will trigger and give you three extra copies. You only need to find your third Mastermind's Acquisition, so feel free to fetch any four Instants and any other three Sorceries you'd like. You can still do 36 damage with this combo even if you intentionally fail to find on everything except the Mastermind's Acquisition. After resolving your four Invent triggers, your psuedo-storm count will be 4.
7.) Cast Mastermind's Acquisition as a wish one last time. Thousand-Year Storm will trigger and give you four extra copies. Worth noting are two things. First, the trigger on Mastermind's Acquisition is mandatory, so you have to use all five copies. Second, the copies made by Thousand-Year Storm will be of the exact same mode as the original cast, so all five copies will fetch from your sideboard. With these five triggers, grab Inescapable Blaze and any other four cards from your sideboard. Storm count = 5.
8.) Cast Inescapable Blaze targeting your opponent. Thousand-Year Storm will make five extra copies which you can aim at your opponent's face, for a total of 30 extra damage, ending up at 36 with the initial spell factored in. This will increase by 6 for every other Instant or Sorcery cast on this turn, so with all of the extra triggers on Invert//Invent and Mastermind's Acquisition, you can really go off for enormous damage values. This is just the fastest way to get to lethal damage in a normal scenario.
So, what are the problems with this deck?
Well, for one, you need to survive until ten mana to cast Omniscience. This is the biggest and most obvious problem. There's basically no way for this deck to beat Mono-Red and it really struggles against other aggressive decks (though, unlike Mono-Red, they are beatable). The 4 Pause for Reflection in the sideboard help against Mentor and Token decks, but you're still highly unfavored. Pelakka Wurm is literally the only chance this deck has against burn; and, even then, 7 life only gets you so far.
The second biggest concern is countermagic. This deck plays no main-board counterspells of its own, so you have to rely on an opposing control deck either not having a counterspell for Omniscience or tapping out against you. The 4 Negate in the sideboard are supposed to help with this problem, as is the Carnage Tyrant, to give you an alternate win condition that can't be dealt with so easily.
The next problem is having all of your copies of Omniscience end up in the graveyard. Getting your other combo cards milled or discarded can be fixed with Flood of Recollection, but Flood can't pick an Enchantment back up. This is why I have the 1-of Enhanced Surveillance, to reshuffle if I lose too many crucial combo pieces.
Finally, Disperse is there to get rid of Shalai, Voice of Plenty or any other card giving the opponent hexproof before firing off the truly Inescapable Blaze.
Oh, I should also mention that the Black dual lands are there to let you cast Mastermind's Acquisition without Omniscience in play to find a tech card like Negate or Enhanced Surveillance game one, or to help you find Omniscience if you have two copies of Acquisition in hand. But, these are incredibly fringe scenarios and the life loss from the shocks is arguably enough of a downside that just running basics may be better. So, you know. Feel free to cut them if you're on a budget.
And that's it. That's my monstrous invention. What are your thoughts? Any ideas to improve it? Like I said, it's not great. But, it's really fun when it works, and it's surprisingly consistent (you know, when you aren't dying on turn 5).