[Deck] MonoU OmniTell

[Lejay]

Picture made by Brentane

This thread will gather discussions on the omniscience+cunning wish mono blue decks. The bases will be the Omniclash build I played at GP Strasbourg to a 9-0 record day one (would have finished 9th without a GL for a left out cunning wish target for a game 3 last round) and the Omnimaniac build that won BoMVII, piloted by Nicolas Goldberg.
GP Strasbourg Decklist
BoM Maniac Decklist
I have no doubt my list is better, especially since Nicolas had a few days of testing where I had months, and that during the tournament it was pretty easy to convince him about most of my choices. It’s far easier for me to justify cards from my perspective and since this primer is an updated version of what I posted on storm boards a month ago it will highly favour the omniclash perspective. But most of the things apply to the BoM winning list anyway and I’ll try to talk about all differences.

The Genesis.

Right after enter the infinite was spoiled (mid October I think) I started working on the best dream halls deck to exploit it with my friend Frédéric Pérez aka Jolalose, the guy with whom I designed the bridgewalkers deck for those who remember that. We knew we wanted pacts of negation so we dismissed the UB griselbrand (discard and dark rituals) version of the deck that was very powerful but couldn’t kill in one turn most of the time and lost on stifle+waste far too easily. Staying mono blue helps a lot in the secondary plan of hardcasting dream halls.
Enter allowed to run about just any kill so we elected to use the most versatile one with cunning wish that doubled as the perfect anti hate card. As soon as December 2012 we had a very close list to what I ran at the GP and decided we would not talk about it nor play it before GP Strasbourg and BoM.
One exception to that rule was talking about it to Brandon Adams aka emidln in January after he designed a list for someone in a scg event. He agreed our list was finely tuned and probably the best at that point. But he was really obsessed with the weakness of cunning wish + dream halls so I talked to him about firemind’s foresight (which Fred and I dismissed for reasons that I will stipulate later). He also seemed to like more the maniac kill he thought about. His latest decklist that I know of :
http://www.mtgthesource.com/forums/s...l=1#post718270
Unfortunately Frédéric couldn’t make it for both GP and BoM.
Nicolas Goldberg started testing the decklist he ran at BoM VII 3 days before the event thanks to Nicolas Brun aka OrGy from his team who got interested in the concept after my run at GP Strasbourg. We talked a bit with OrGy but he was clearly more influenced by the English articles published about the deck. Nicolas has been running Tempo threshold for months in tournaments but recognized the raw power of the pack. I can only confirm that since as of today my testing only finds 3 bad match-ups for the deck. Reanimator, Tin Fins and UR Omniscience mirror with flusterstorm (Testing against dredge was 50/50 post sb but it’s probably negative overall too).

Links didn’t give you the decklist I consider the best as of now. This is what I ran at BoM VII :
3 City of Traitors
3 Polluted Delta
4 Flooded Strand
10 Island
1 Emrakul, the Aeons Torn
1 Leyline of Sanctity
3 Dream Halls
4 Omniscience
3 Cunning Wish
3 Pact of Negation
4 Brainstorm
4 Force of Will
1 Gitaxian Probe
4 Enter the Infinite
4 Ponder
4 Preordain
4 Show and Tell
SB: 1 Trickbind
SB: 1 Slaughter Pact
SB: 1 Sapphire Charm
SB: 1 Rushing River
SB: 1 Release the Ants
SB: 1 Noxious Revival
SB: 1 Intuition
SB: 1 Eladamri's Call
SB: 3 Defense Grid
SB: 3 Leyline of Sanctity
SB: 1 Pact of Negation

I barely made day 2 after going 7-2 (first defeat round 6 against the undefeated ANT player that will get Dqed for stacking, and another very unlucky defeat to a friend playing Tempo thresh). Starting day 2 with a very very very close defeat versus counterbalance put me in a difficult bracket and I lose to team America and reanimator.
Christoph Alsheimer aka Nemavera also played the same 75 I ran and fell short of one win from the top8 after going 8-1 day 1.

Main game plan of the deck :

Casting enter the infinite either with show and tell/omniscience or with dream halls.
Yeah 1 line is enough

Justifyings the slots :

10 Island : No real reason to open yourself to mana denial with such a powerful deck. Frédéric plays the UB list on MTGO from time to time for fun but it just auto loses to stifle/wasteland. You want to be able to cast dream halls. Maybe the deck could play only 9 islands but we were on the 10 islands side before the GP and I am still today.

4 flooded strand, 3 polluted delta : 6 fetches to reshuffle are the necessary. We hesitated several times between 6 and 7. At BoM the 7th was played instead of the 4th city.
You don’t want to run too much fetchlands as you finish a lot of games very low on life, maybe 6 fetches is the best choice.

3 city of traitors : I was convinced cities would be better than tombs very early and testing proved me right even if I forced myself testing with splits for a very long time. 2 life matters very often if it can give you a turn. Since this deck is monoU, if you land a non basic it will almost never survive. Therefore there is very little drawback at only running cities. The only games where you will prefer some numbers of tombs are some post board games with defense grid. That’s not enough to overweight the rest of the games.
After the GP I allowed myself to start playtesting at a pretty high rate in 2-mens on MTGO. That allowed me to realize that 4th city was inferior to another blue source, in making land drops but moreover on mulligans since a hand with one blue land can be almost always kept whereas 0 blue lands can almost never be kept. I still think 17 blue sources is the way to go.

Omniscience : the number 1 thing to put with S&T.

Dream Halls : Yes it costs 5 mana but this is also show and tell + omniscience in one card if you have enter the infinite. With the deck’s manabase 5 mana isn’t a big deal. Of course you can also show and tell it.
Dream halls can combo with wish->intuition->EtI if you have 3 blue cards to spare.
If you want to run 4 of them then you have to play firemind’s foresight.

4 enter the infinite : At the beginning we had 3 enter and 4 cunning wish. But when we cut the gitaxian probes and added the 3rd dream halls, the dream halls/cunning wish weak interaction occurred a bit more. Since Maverick was disappearing, we reasoned we would less often need wishes for oblivion rings (there are also a bit less miracles lately) and that teeg would rarely be on our way. So we switched.
Don’t forget you can just cast a second EtI with an empty library to avoid decking.

3 cunning wish : generally the best card post sb, so don’t judge it only by making preboard tests. Wish trickbind is, with the monoU shell and the full free hard counters suite, one of the big advantages of the decklist. Noxious revival is also very helpful against discard among other things. But I’ll talk about the wish targets when talking about sideboard.

1 emrakul : Everyone on forums seems to think it’s there to win the clash. I generally put enter the infinite back with another EtI, that’s enough to win against most decks. If I fear extirpate I may put back an emrakul but omniscience would almost always do the same. Emrakul is essentially there because it’s an alternative uncounterable kill if something prevents you from killing with RtA. Main reason being if the opponent plays emrakul. You can just win by attacking then. I don’t consider Emrakul a dead card. It combos with the rest of the deck whether it is with omniscience or just a single show and tell on some rare occasions (only happended once to me at GP Strasbourg). Besides Omniscience-Emrakul is your main plan against Thalia decks and Teeg decks thanks to wish -> eladamri’s call. In these match-ups you side out the pacts of negation and therefore don’t need to kill right away. Also the creature dodges some of their hate. Just untapping through Thalia can also be good enough if you need to deal with a board with rushing riverx2 (kicked and maybe noxious revivaled) before annihilating.

1 gitaxian probe : what I wrote on storm boards a month ago : “Information is very important, and especially game one.. If there was one thing I’d like to put back, it’s some number of gitaxian probes. But we needed so much space for sideboard that it spread over the main deck by one slot.”
One gitaxian probe came back instead f the sensei’s divining top. I feel the gitaxian probe is slightly better, but if the metagame becomes as discard heavy as it was a few months ago the SDT will probably come back.
If you really don’t like playing maindeck leyline considering your metagame, play a 2nd probe instead. But the sb cut will be HARD.

4 Brainstorm : we all play legacy

4 ponders : > to preordain

4 preordain : I just never side out a preordain and wouldn’t cut a single one from this build. That’s absolutely necessary if you want to play a combo deck without tutors. And even if you really want to fit in some intuitions, please try cutting something else.

4 force of wills, 3 pacts of negation : We had 3 fows /4 PoN for a while. But the meta becoming a lot more comboish we decided to switch a few weeks before the GP. Against non combo decks with counters I side in the PoN and side out a fow.
The choice of PoN is of course to play a maximum of free hard counters to hardcast dream halls or play around taxing effects (sometimes both !). The most plausible replacement is flusterstorm, but we think PoN is better against tempo and control decks. There are the discard decks and the combo decks, but that’s when leylines comes into the equation. To summarize it even if you are a bit less good in game ones with pacts in the meta, your deck will always be optimized post board.

4 Show and tell : Makes the deck so dumb.

1 leyline of sanctity : this singleton has probably intrigued most of the readers. The first thing to know is that about two months before the GP, when the meta was even more filled with discard, we even considered playing the 4 leylines main deck to adapt to it completely.
At that time I was already thinking about playing a one-of from my previous experiment with DDFT (1 LLoS sb) since that gives an 11% chance of blanking a lot of the opponent spells without having the drawback of drawing several of them.
Since discard decreased and pact of negation has some value as a blue cards for fow and dream halls, we had this split. That helped us gaining a sb slot (the sapphire charm) very welcomed against hate bear decks.

Sideboard :

3 Defense Grid : the first tests against tempo were very simple. We crushed them preboard, and post board they destroyed us because they increase a lot the number of their hard counters. The defense grid idea came very quickly and proved to be all we need. Thanks to it we can claim a positive tempo thresh match-up all the way and it also helps in all match-ups sideboarding additional situational hard counters including flusterstorm (our worst enemy).
Nicolas (Goldberg) and Nicolas (Brun) (I will say N&N from now on) agree they are very necessary to the sideboard.

3 Leyline of Sanctity : probably the best sideboard card for any show and tell deck. Not only blanking discard, it also is of some help against many combo decks.

1 Trickbind : answers most post sb hate by cunning wishing it under omniscience. The only situation when you prefer stifle would be when you pact with 4 mana up once in the upkeep and the wish in hand. That almost never happens and doesn’t outweight all the situations where split second matters (griselbrand, counterbalance, etc…)

1 Slaughter Pact : answers hate bears for free. You can trickbind the trigger but generally combo when resolving it.

1 Sapphire Charm : With only 3 wishes the “cycle a redundant wish” clause is a bit less useful. That said it answers hate bears beautifully in the end of turn which can be quite useful against Thalia since it is possible every mana will count. It’s also a blue card for fow and dream halls and can cyle when sided in. I would not cut the slaughter pact, but if I wanted more hate bears slots I would increase the number of sapphire charms before the number of pacts.

1 Rushing River : non creatures permanents sometimes matter and this is the most efficient bounce against them. Of course if MUD is everywhere in your metagame you are free to adapt the sb to run hurkyl’s recall, or if there are a lot of empty the warrens run echoing truth. But as it is rushing river does what we need a bounce to do 99% of the time with only one slot.

1 Release the Ants : I talked about its use in the Emrakul explanation. We used to run searing wind in that slot (used in conjunction with noxious revival). After hours and hours of speleology on a yellow magic website I finally found a better kill. This one kills on the spot, bypassing teeg and possibly thalia. It complements very well with the main deck emrakul. Searing wind is only superior to it in the other show and tell match-ups (emrakul in their lib, or when they activate a grisebrand after we show and tell).

1 Noxious Revival : Very useful against discard. It also doubles as grave hate and I side it in against reanimator, dredge, tin fins or oops.

1 Intuition : so that your wishes can be enter the infinite. It is often sided in when emrakul is the main plan and pacts/leylines are unnecessary.

1 Eladamri's Call : Emrakul’s Call. One of the least wished slots but is an important part of the plan against thalia/teeg decks.

1 Pact of Negation : wishable and sideboard card. You often exchange it for a fow against non combo fow match-ups.


Cards we didn’t include or we cut :

Main deck sensei’s divining top : So we got a gitaxian probe back like which I already justified. Here is what I wrote about it when I had it : “I know it’s the same for all decks using SDT, but this is even more true in this one : you really don’t want to see a second SDT. You are a combo deck with essentially only fows to prevent them from killing you so you don’t have much time to exploit and get rid of a second one. You just lose too much time without a shuffler if you draw two. That said in a meta full of discard and as a deck that wants as much library manipulation as possible the first one is a good one. It also offers an instant draw effect post enter the infinite.”
The instant draw effect post EtI has never been useful so far unfortunately.

Main deck intuition : First I was tired of siding out intuitions because of surgical in a deck with so few space to fit everything in. In addition to that intuition kind of asks to play at the very least 5 sol land, and play them early to stay in the tempo. That generally results in them getting promptly wasted and sometimes you still get your intuition countered by a taxing effect. So I replaced the intuitions by 2-3 gitaxian probes to try and the deck ran much more smoothly. The probes are now [s]gone[/s] reduced to one but the deck still is dense enough in cantrips to find what it needs in time.
If you run firemind’s foresight you have to run a single intuition. If you go that way and adapt the manabase 1 copy is fine. Before cutting intuition my test conclusions were that the deck wanted either 0 or 1 intuition. I decided to run 0 because the sb intuition sometimes came in and because I wanted a more resilient manabase. Running 2 however seems not good enough to me.

Main deck Impulse : The other condition for running firemind’s foresight is running a 2cc. I was afraid running impulses would start getting a bit slow as it was for intuition but N&N assured me the impulse x1 was awesome. Maybe they are right (that happens sometimes), but I still don’t like the fact that with only 1 impulse the firemind’s foresight plan is screwed if you draw it.

Main deck Trickbind : only clever in decks running firemind’s foresight and no Emrakul main deck as a semi-insurance against CB for maniac. Having to run it seems horrible to me but if someone wants to write a paragraph advising it I’ll copy it here.

Main deck Grim monolith : The list only runs 3 dream halls and it clearly doesn’t accelerate as much as it does in hive mind. I don’t think it’s better than lands or business/protection. It also opens you to abrupt decay. That “I don’t care about decay and drs” was among one of the first things that got us work on the deck. It also opens you to spell snare and if you want to play around daze you’ll need 3 lands on the table already, that is slow.

Flusterstorm : Already talked a bit about it when justifying the counters. N&N agreed after BoM that 4th fow is better main deck than their 1-of flusterstorm.

Sideboard firemind’s foresight : useful to have dream halls + cunning wish + 2 blue cards + 0 mana function. I found that one quite early in my speleology sessions but we quickly dismissed with Frédéric. Ari Lax and Brandon Adams/Emidln and some other American posters seem fond about it so maybe we are wrong (but doubt so). The reason we don’t want to play it is that not only does it costs a sideboard slot, it also forces you to run a non optimal otherwise main deck with at least a 2cc and an intuition main deck. And even if you do make those sacrifices, if you draw one of those, FF becomes useless. The dream halls/wish kill with 2 blue cards isn’t necessary often enough for all these drawbacks in our opinion.
Update : Nicolas G. told me he had 4 games out of 15 rounds where he used it. 2 of them he could have gone off 1-2 turns later. In my opinion that’s less useful than defense grid #3, especially if it gives constraints on the main deck.

Sideboard surgical extraction : No space and noxious does some of the job. N&N agree it is far inferior to noxious.

Sideboard echoing truth : I personnally think echoing truth's only appeal is answering empty the warrens and rarely zombie tokens. But imo cunning wish -> echoing truth is too slow for that so I prefer the rushing river / sapphire charm split. I'm unsure about N&N's current opinion.

Sideboard Stormtide Leviathan : This was our slot against maverick. Definitely worth playing if the deck is popular in your metagame We cut it because maverick really declined and stormtide isn’t as good against other thalia decks.

Sideboard brain freeze : you can kill with brainfreeze with either firemind’s foresight sequences (with weird slots) or with just a second SDT main deck. This kill still doesn’t answers the emrakul’s decks and opens himself to some additional hate. Therefore we prefer Release the Ants which can also steal some games with an instant lucky kill when things go wrong.

Laboratory Maniac + research/development : this kill simply shuffles back maniac thanks to a wished research. Then you cantrip into it, play it, and play cantrips ftw. In case of removal either counter it or play a brainstorm in response. This kill is only vulnerable to very few random things (sudden shock/death/sudden spoiling, weaker against chains of Mephistopheles or counterbalance) so it’s perfectly good if you really don’t want the Emrakul main deck.

To people not used to playing cantrips in combo

I'm not going to write a complete guide on cantrips but my experience watching unexperienced people playing this deck showed me I had to write a minimum about it.
You are a combo deck. If you don't gather a combo you'll lose 100% of the time. That means that when for example you lack a show and tell and your preordain doesn't show it, you put every non cantrip card on the bottom. Even if you are against tempo thresh or miracles you can't afford to keep a counterspell for back-up. You'll find more of these later. There are 7 of them when you only have 4 show and tell.
Same with lands. Just put them on bottom or reshuffle them with ponder. I run 20 lands in my list, which is quite large, so that I don't have to worry about finding more of them. It would have to be an extreme corner case for me to keep a fetch on ponder or an island on preordain if I still didn't gather all the combo pieces. Only exceptions of course is the cantrips if they improve your digging power. That means you'll put them on bottom if you already have too many in hand compared to the opponent's clock.
Finally don't forget in your set up that dream halls and cunning wish is the least attracting combo, especially without firemind's foresight.

I said earlier that I wouldn't cut a single cantrip from the decklist because they are so important. So don't waste them.

Play or draw

People will probably have to play quite a lot the deck to believe me on this one.
At BoM Nemavera and I were letting our opponents play in all unknown game ones.

That started with some odd results I had in testing against TES and death and taxes before the GP, with the deck performing better on the draw than on the play. I was starting to wonder if those were statistical anomalies or a real thing. I could find justifications for both match-ups (your interaction with TES is free whether it is leyline or fow and both combo decks want to see a maximum number of cards. ; against death and taxes you can race thalia/canonist etc… but you’ll still have to face it when they play it off show and tell, and you’ll probably need more cards in your combo whether they are additional lands or cunning wish for trickbind + you don’t want the opponent to see too many hate cards) but I had insufficient stats before the GP to apply that strategy with confidence. After the GP I played 40 games against death and taxes and results were confirming the first series.both presb and post sb. In MTGO 2-mens I started to let my discard decks opponents play first post sb when I sided in leylines. And since it seemed to be working (either no difference or the additional card saved me) I chose to systematically let my opponent start to test out for the GP. I think the fact decks have so few ways to interact with you means you only want to start in pure race match-ups like elfball, dredge or show and tell decks. But even against storm I am now inclined to let my opponent play post sb.
The number of decks where I was satisfied of being the first to draw became so important that me, Frédéric and Nemavera are now convinced letting the opponent start is the right move if you don’t know what he plays.
I’m even considering letting a tempo thresh opponent start if he doesn’t run stifle (was unbelievable for me before the BoM, but now I’m not sure).
This should be funny for you at the beginning since people will either make strange faces or put you on manaless dredge and mulligan aggressively for deathrite shaman.

Last word

I’m not used stating obvious things so if people are lost on something about the combo/choices don’t hesitate asking and I’ll (painfully) edit the primer. You can also take a look at what NesretepNoj wrote before I finished updating this one here :
http://www.mtgthesource.com/forums/s...-Cunning-Halls

To finish I wrote down some sideboard tables for my latest list the day before leaving for BoM because Pierre Sommen wanted to play it in the trial (he went 7-3 playing the deck for the first time and I went 7-2-1, we should have more let our opponents play) and Nemavera was sold on the deck. Here they are :


Tempo Thresh

-1 Emrakul (they can’t attack your hand with discard so surgical is unlikely to hit cunning wish if they play it. No other reason to keep Emrakul when you rely more on nPoN).
-1 Dream Halls (classic sideout against daze decks).
-1 FoW (Because PoN is better)
-1 LloS

+3 Defense Grid
+1 PoN

Esper stoneblade.

-1 Emrakul (less worst and they run Jaces)
-1 Gitaxian Probe (Classic SB out when you go up to 4 LLoS)
-2 FoW

+3 LloS
+1 PoN (You don’t need to counter sorcery speed spells most of the time)

If your opponent is siding in a lot of hatebears (canonist, meddlin mage…) adapt by playing more fows and siding in at least the sapphire charm, maybe more.
If you’re opponent is really heavy on discard+ surgicals consider keeping the Emrakul (and therefore play less PoN).

Shardless BUG

-1 Emrakul
-1 Gitaxian probe
-2 FoW

+3 LLoS
+1 PoN

This has been tested against my shardless list with lots of planeswalker which has become popular in France. It doesn’t run surgical. If you see several surgicals with discard and less planeswalkers keeping the Emrakul is a good idea.

Elfball

I fully expect cabal therapies and often more discard. Hate bear is possible but uncertain. Therefore
-3 PoN
-1 GP
+3 LLoS
+1 Sapphire charm

is the default sideboarding. Adapt as always.

Tin Fins (considering most lists run discard now and no fows)

-3 PoN
-1 GP
-2 Wish
+3 LLoS
+1 Intuition
+1 Noxious
+1 Trickbind

I guess I would do the same against classic reanimator as you can dodge daze easily. Consider grid against a reanimator with several pierces/flusterstorms.

Sneak Show

You are very likely to kill with Emrakul. So :
-1 PoN
-1 LLoS
-1 Brainstorm
+3 defense grid

Combo quickly thanks to defense grid daze/pierce proof, or get into a long game and kill with dream halls (wishable brainstorm is nice for the long game).

Ichorid

-3 PoN
-1 GP
+3 LLoS
+1 Noxious

BUG Delver

-1 GP
-1 Dream Halls
-1 Emrakul
+3 LLoS

As always adapt to the disruption seen.

Burn

-3 PoN
-1 GP
+3 LLoS
+1 Intuition

Tendrils based decks

-3 PoN
-1 GP
+3 LloS
+1 Intuition
Possibly –1 island +1 trickbind

Maverick and Death and taxes

-3 PoN
-1 LLoS
+1 Sapphire charm
+1 Slaughter pact
+1 Rushing river
+1 Intuition

Remember the game plan against Thalia decks is Emrakul. It also bypasses Teeg. Intuition in means you have 4 spells to trickbind hate permanents on show and tell.

Imperial Painter

-1 LLoS
-1 fetch
-1 FoW
+3 Defense Grid

Jund

-3 PoN
+3 LLoS
If the opponent is heavy on reb blasts cut the probe instead of a PoN.

UW Miracles

-1 LLoS
-1 FoW
-1 Island
+3 Defense Grid

High Tide

Didn’t test. Probably
-1 LLoS
–1 Emrakul
–1 Island
+3 Defense Grid (be careful as it is symmetrical)

Aluren

-1 Emrakul
-1 GP
-1 PoN / FoW / Island ? (still untested)
+ 3 LLoS

Counter if they intuition in response to show and tell as they are very likely to get 3 alurens