Brewing Rainbow Omniscience

Posted on November 16, 2018

TKTF!!! Am I right? In case you don't know, that stands for "Thank Kruphix it's Friday'! Which means more decks! Thanks to MTG Arena and this wonderful Standard format, I can provide you wonderful folks with new decks and updates to brews. I've been streaming a lot recently on Twitch and I have been discovering new and fun decks. Today I am going to be giving you two new brews. One brew is a control deck with a combo finish in Omniscience and the other is a brew around Fall of the Thran. Both decks are sweet, but the fun factor is much higher in the Omniscience deck. I just enjoy drawing a million cards and then making my opponent draw their whole deck or burning them out of the game. I'll explain all that and how it works in a second. Let's go ahead and look at the decklist.

Rainbow OMNI-SCIENCE | Guilds Standard | Ali Aintrazi

Planeswalkers (1)
1 Teferi, Hero of Dominaria

Enchantments (6)
2 Omniscience
4 Gift of Paradise

There it is in all its glory! If you enjoyed Rainbow Lich, you will love this deck as well. Like Rainbow Lich this deck has no win conditions main deck (unless you want to count Teferi, Hero of Dominaria). The win conditions are gotten from the sideboard. The goal of this deck is to ramp, draw cards, and survive until you can cast Omniscience. When you cast Omniscience you should be winning on the spot. You don't want to cast Omniscience without a follow up play. Getting your Omniscience tucked with Teferi, bound with Conclave Tribunal, or eaten with Vraska, Relic Seeker are all things you can and should avoid.

The game usually plays out like a dance of survival, ramp, and card draw. It's important to know when you need to do each. The deck has a ton of ramp, but it is offset with the power of Overflowing Insight and Mastermind's Acquisition which both allow you to refuel. Usually when you cast Overflowing Insight without an active Omniscience it's to refuel, and your shields will be down the following turn. It is imperative that you know what your opponent can do when your shields are down. Ask questions like:

Will Heroic Reinforcements kill me if I tap out?

Am I dead to a Crackling Drake & Maximize Velocity?

Can I win this game if I hold up Settle the Wreckage instead of just drawing 7 right now and closing out the game next turn? This is important when you have the mana to cast Omniscience.

Plan with Mastermind's Acquisition. You will need to predict how the game will play out and grab the card you need. Is it Cleansing Nova? Omniscience to win next turn? Overflowing Insight to refuel? Maybe a Nezahal or Chromium on turn four because you're playing against control and it is Game 1. This takes some getting used to but you will get it the more reps you play.

The Combo

This deck doesn't take infinite turns like Rainbow Lich. Instead, it just kills them in one turn. It will almost always involve Thousand-Year Storm. You will play Omniscience when you have at least one Mastermind's Acquisition or one Overflowing Insight in hand. After you resolve Omniscience you'll grab an Overflowing Insight with Mastermind's Acquisition or use the one you already have. After drawing a ton of cards you'll want to get to a point where you can Mastermind's Acquisition for Thousand-Year Storm. From that point you should have cast enough instants and sorceries to force your opponent to draw their whole deck with Overflowing Insight or you can use another Mastermind's Acquisition to grab Inescapable Blaze and burn them out.

If you happen to have both Mastermind's and Overflowing in your hand when you play Omniscience, you will want to Mastermind first for Thousand-Year Storm then draw at least fourteen cards (if you have no more instants/sorceries in hand) with Overflowing Insight and combo from there.

This is currently the deck I enjoy playing the most. It's just so fun to play and comboing off with it is a blast. Some ramp decks run into the problem of just drawing a ton of lands/ramp, and while this deck can do that, having a playset of Overflowing Insight and Mastermind's Acquisition really helps to smooth things out. The deck has 35 sources of mana, so over half the deck is mana sources. Eleven more spots are devoted to removal while the rest is combo or a wild card in Mastermind's Acquisition. I highly recommend trying this deck out if you enjoy control with a combo finish.

Next up is another deck we brewed on Twitch. The card the viewers wanted us to brew around was Fall of the Thran. We started out just playing Fall of the Thran but it just wasn't really cutting it. We then had the option of splashing Blue for Tatyova, Benthic Druid or splashing Black for Phyrexian Scriptures and removal. The idea of exiling the opponent's graveyard with Phyrexian Scriptures after playing Fall of the Thran was very appealing whereas splashing Blue for a five-mana 3/3 was not. So, the deck ended up being Abzan and it has some real grind and an Armageddon finish.

Abzan Fall | Guilds Standard | Ali Aintrazi

Instants (3)
3 Vraska's Contempt

Again, this deck was made by Twitch chat and me. If you want to get in on that action, then make sure to follow my Twitch channel for when I go live. This deck is your typical midrange deck except that it plays Fall of the Thran and it has multiple ways to make it one sided or punish your opponent more when you play it. Let's go over some of those.

Phyrexian Scriptures: You'll want to play Fall of the Thran when Scriptures gets its second lore counter, that when your sagas trigger next turn, you can stack them, so Scriptures will exile your opponent's graveyard first not allowing them to get any lands back with Fall of the Thran.

The Mending of Dominaria: The Mending doesn't stop your opponent from getting lands back but it insures you get all your lands back that you destroy. You'll want to play Fall of the Thran when The Mending of Dominaria gets its second lore counter for optimal value.

Remorseful Cleric: This one is pretty straightforward, you just exile your opponent's graveyard after you destroy all the lands so they don't get to recur any with Fall of the Thran. Remorseful Cleric also happens to be randomly good on its own at times, like against Izzet Drakes and even Golgari to counter Find // Finality (the front half anyway).

Vraska: Either Vraska can destroy Fall of the Thran, this will mean you and your opponent won't get lands back. Only do this if you already have a great boardstate and / or planeswalkers that will take over the game after all the lands are destroyed. Same can be said for Knight of Autumn.

The card I'm not sold on just yet is Militia Bugler. It does hit every creature in our deck, including Multani, but the times when it misses create such feel bad moments, and we aren't super heavy on creatures to begin with. Other than that, this deck is still in the works but has a solid base. I'm excited to continue playing it and seeing where it goes.

Because of MTG Arena and me just playing/streaming more Magic in general, I am getting to play with more and more cards. I've been trying to explore cards / decks that have not gotten much attention to see if we can find any hidden gems in the rubble. At the very least, we are getting some sweet brews!

As always, thanks for reading,

Ali Aintrazi

Follow me @AliEldrazi

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TAGS articles, standard, constructed, analysis, ali aintrazi, decklist, brewing, guilds standard, 11162018, omniscience