When I was writing my preview of Baloth Woodcrashers I was aware of Oracle of Mul Daya via unofficial spoiler pages but since I try to only talk about cards that are on the official Zendikar Visual Spoiler on the mothership I could only reference it obliquely. Sure enough the Oracle was added to the rapidly expanding official page that next morning so I will talk about it now in what I hope is first of a series of looks at the cards from the impending release. So what does the future hold for the Oracle?

I love this card; absolutely love it. I am not sure if it will prove to be tournament viable or not (insert obligatory comment about it dying to Lightning Bolt and Doom Blade here) but it is the closest green will ever come to having a high velocity enchantment like Future Sight to tear through your library. If you happen to be in Columbus, Ohio for the Saturday Prerelease I will be looking for a copy of this card to put right into my EDH deck – along with a much harder to find Misty Rainforest. But I can easily see this card being played in decks that are 39 cards smaller as well.

If landfall has any Constructed impact – and I think it will – then this card will provide fuel for that linear. I discussed in the Woodcrashers preview that a card like Knight of the Reliquary allows you up to four landfall activations in one turn if you play a fetch land, activate it, and fetch another fetch land with your Knight. So does the Oracle, provided there is some permutation of two fetch lands between your hand and the top two cards of your deck.

(By the way, in case anyone is still sleeping on Knight of the Reliquary, let me remind you that it did win an Extended Grand Prix toward the end of last season.)

While the Oracle does not have the sure-fire way of finding you that second land to play it does expand your hand size to include the top of your deck in search of that land. It also plays well with Knight in that the Knight gives you extra shuffles – from the Knight’s ability and from the ability of the fetch land you will no doubt search up — to see if you can float a land to the top of your deck.

While Future Sight was the first comparison I made to this card the comparison to Exploration is obviously much more apt and I will be looking toward this card in a blue-green deck that attempts to abuse Time Warp similar to the deck John Mahon took second place with at a recent Roanoke PTQ for Pro Tour Austin.

Blue-Green Time Warp
John Mahon – 2nd Place
PTQ Roanoke: Standard

4 Forest
6 Island
4 Howling Mine
4 Flooded Grove
1 Mirror Sheen
4 Fertile Ground
2 Shelldock Isle
4 Vivid Grove
4 Jace Beleren
4 Cryptic Command
3 Primal Command
4 Garruk Wildspeaker
3 Firespout
3 Savor the Moment
3 Twincast
4 Reflecting Pool
4 Time Warp
Sideboard:
2 Banefire
4 Dragon’s Claw
3 Cloudthresher
4 Great Sable Stag
2 Chameleon Colossus

This deck will require a total overhaul for Standard once Zendikar rotates as the Fertile Ground, both Commands, Savor the Moment, Firespout, Mirror Sheen, Shelldrock Isle, and the entire non-basic mana base are all rotating out. Fetch lands, including the highly anticipated Misty Rainforest, will pick up some of the slack, and Trace of Abundance can almost fill in for Fertile Ground, although it does not play well with Garruk.

I am not sure how you would reimagine the deck – you likely need to play Quest for Ancient Secrets for recursion – but I am sure that it would include Oracle just as the original Time Warp decks were built around Exploration. Classically this is a broken ability even when symmetrical – which Oracle is not!

Clash is going away and scrying has not shown up as a Zendikar mechanic so there do not appear to be a lot of ways to stack lands on top of your deck in the new Standard format to abuse with the Oracle. Staying with the blue-green theme for a minute, you will be a lot less likely to shuffle away two lands on a Ponder with Oracle in play. In the meanwhile we will have to be happy with shuffling our deck for a fresh crack at drawing extra lands out of our deck and from the fetch lands to Nessa Revane there do not seem to be any shortage of ways to do that.

As I said earlier in this post, I don’t know where this card will factor into Standard when Zendikar is poised to rotate and the tournaments results have been tallied. I do know that as soon as we start hosting some mock tournaments for the new Standard and Extended you will find the words Oracle of Mul Dava markered onto the back of Lorwyn rejects.