Can you make it to ten mana? If you can, you'll
never need another drop of it again. (Well,
okay, except to activate abilities.) When this
card was previewed, Aaron Forsythe (I think it
was Aaron) made the valid point that by the time
you get up to ten mana, you've likely played out
your hand. So what do you do with a card that
lets you cast cards for free when you've already
cast most of your cards and amassed a ton of
mana you no longer have a use for? The idea of
getting free spells is incredibly exciting, but
pulling it off might take so long you forget
what it was you wanted to cast.
My recommendation is to play this alongside a
pull playset each of Mind Stone and Dreamstone
Hedron. That way you can ramp up your mana
faster to get to ten, then sack the mana rocks
to refill your hand. Include some draw spells
like Foresee to help you keep your hand full
(and find the Omniscience in the first place). I
was going to suggest Blue Sun's Zenith as a way
to refill your hand, but then I realized that
with Omniscience out, you cna just make your
opponent draw a quarthordecillion cards and win
on the spot. In fact, if Omniscience interacts
the way I think it does with X spells, it just
singlehandedly replaced a LOT of infinite mana
combos.
I don't really see this taking off in Standard,
where ten mana needs to win you the game
outright instead of just making all the rest of
your spells free. But in Casual, where big mana
bombs rule the roost, it's going to be the new
reason you play blue.
This is a surprisingly difficult card to
evaluate. Once you have it in play, it's pretty
hard to actually lose the game, but getting it
in play is the problem. If you make your deck
focused on getting it into play, you may end up
lacking things to do once it's there. If you
make your deck focused on doing huge splashy
things once it's in play, you may sometimes
struggle to actually get it into play. It's hard
to argue with the possible payoff, though, and
somewhere in the middle there probably lies a
very powerful strategy; and somewhere in the
future, I expect a letter-writing campaign to
get Show and Tell banned in Legacy.
Welcome back readers todays card of the day is
quite the doozy as breaking fundamental rules of
Magic is quite powerful. In standard this is
expensive and with no way to cheat it into play
your plan of attack is not likely to go over
well if your spending cards to ramp into this
what will you play next after blowing cards to
get to this? Possibly combined with Gilded Lotus
in some sort of mana accelerate artifact deck.
In modern this while interesting requires a
dedicated commitment I could possibly see a deck
using this as the win condition but as of now I
don’t suspect it will see much play. In legacy
this is great to Show and Tell into play
allowing you to drop big threats or play card
draw spells and just plop your entire deck onto
the table, rather than putting one threat into
play this I feel is the biggest threat you can
cheat into play as if not answered immediately
it may just win you the game. In vintage this
card is expensive but fast mana exists so I
can’t dismiss the notion this card could see
play in some capacity. In casual and multiplayer
this card is amazing if you can get it out you
warp the game into your favor especially potent
combined with card draw, make sure to keep some
counterspells in hand to use for free to protect
it. In limited its really expensive and you
would most likely be playing threats not saving
them in your hand to dump when this hits play,
Overall this is going to be a powerful casual
and eternal card providing an unseen game
changing effect.
Today's card of the day is Omniscience which is
a ten mana Blue that allows you to play nonland
cards from your hand without paying their mana
costs. This is a powerful effect on a very
expensive card and outside of a few ways to get
it into play earlier it is not fast enough to be
worth using. In addition a build using
this will likely need enhanced draw power or a
combo to really take advantage of it which makes
the design congested and easy to disrupt.
Overall this is not something that will see much
play outside of Commander, where it can be
devastating, and possibly a few Casual decks.
For Limited the cost is high and the effect not
really useful by the time you can actually cast
it as anything drawn should be playable before
this and in only a small number of situations
will that much mana be needed for anything other
than the drawn card. Aside from Rare
drafting this can easily be passed in Booster
and sidedecked in Sealed as nearly any creature,
removal, or acceleration will have more of an
impact on a game by being available earlier or
as a topdeck.
