Omniscience is an extremely powerful combo card. Whether you’re cheating it into play with Kona, Rescue Beastie in Standard or Show and Tell in Legacy, the enchantment has proven to be a great build-around that makes it trivial to win the game once in play.
Now, the card is even making its presence felt in Modern in an unusual archetype. A Temur Wizards shell abusing Omniscience made top eight of a Magic Online Modern Challenge, perfectly blending midrange and combo strategies together. If you enjoy generating tons of value, this deck could be right up your alley.
Setting Up Omniscience
The main goal behind this deck is to get Omniscience into the graveyard, then enable Delirium. That way, you can maximize the power of Shifting Woodland. Shifting Woodland received a ton of hype during Modern Horizons 3 spoiler season but ultimately fell short of expectations. That being said, its synergy with Omniscience specifically is still noteworthy.
In order to make this gameplan as consistent as possible, you need ways to dig for Omniscience and get it into the graveyard. Your primary discard outlet that also does a good job churning through your library is Faithless Looting. Faithless Looting sets up Delirium in no time.
The other discard outlet you’ll find is Oracle of Tragedy. Oracle is a decent blocker that pairs perfectly with Flare of Denial.
Once you manage to make Shifting Woodland into a copy of Omniscience, you’ll be able to relish all of your card advantage for free and pull super far ahead. Cards like Lorien Revealed become incredible value engines with Omniscience in play.
As you continue to draw cards, you’ll eventually find copies of Quantum Riddler to cast. You may not have an immediate game-ender like Thassa’s Oracle, but that really isn’t necessary. Just make sure to fill up your hand with counter magic and removal, and your Quantum Riddlers will attack for lethal over the course of a couple turns.
Wizards Package Adds Consistency
As a combo deck, it might seem a bit strange to implement a Wizards package. However, there’s a surprising amount of overlap between these Wizards, Wizard payoffs, and your primary gameplan.
We mentioned Oracle of Tragedy already as an efficient discard outlet for Omniscience and a way to make Flare of Denial a reliable free Counterspell. Well, Thundertrap Trainer fills a similar role. It isn’t a discard outlet, but it makes up for this by letting you look at four cards. Whether you nab Flare of Denial, Omniscience, or any other useful interactive element, Thundertrap Trainer pulls its weight.
Once you add on the fact that Oracle and Trainer are both Wizards, they become even more appealing. This is because you unlock Flame of Anor as an unbelievable tool. Getting to draw two cards while also disrupting your opponent is a big deal.
Flame of Anor, Flare of Denial and Unholy Heat do a good job buying you time until you can assemble Shifting Woodland and Omniscience. Then, when you copy Omniscience, Flame of Anor serves as another card draw spell alongside Lorien Revealed to keep the card advantage flowing and find Quantum Riddler to end the game.
Double Trouble
These two complimenting angles of attack make it difficult for your opponents to shut your deck down. Shifting Woodland is definitely resilient to discard spells and counter magic. The problem is that it’s weak to graveyard hate. As a result, going all in on Shifting Woodland isn’t always going to work in games two and three. Even in game one, Urza’s Saga strategies typically have access to some form of graveyard hate to tutor for, and Affinity is on the rise in Modern.
Fortunately, you have plenty of recourse the way this deck is constructed. First of all, it’s not impossible to win fair games. Curving Unholy Heat into Wrenn and Six and building your way up to hard casting Quantum Riddler is a reasonable alternate path to victory.
From there, in the face of graveyard hate pieces like Tormod’s Crypt, you have access to a full playset of Flame of Anor to answer it. While this does force you to refuel your graveyard, this shell is built to keep your opponent off-balance and find Omniscience once again. Nature’s Claim out of the sideboard then gives you outs to more brutal forms of hate such as Leyline of the Void.
Having a combo finish in the mix means that you’ll be able to end games quicker and more reliably. Against faster combo archetypes like Belcher that aren’t easy to race, Flare of Denial and Force of Negation out of the sideboard put up a pretty good fight.
If anything, your biggest weakness likely comes against decks with lots of land denial. Mono-white land destruction has been making a splash in Modern lately, and gaining any traction with Shifting Woodland in that matchup is extremely difficult. You’ll also need to be weary of Blood Moon effects.
The good news is that most Modern decks don’t feature many forms of land denial. Temur Wizards combo may have appeared out of nowhere, yet it has a lot going for it in the current metagame. Make sure to keep it on your radar in case it’s poised for a breakout.
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