When Anticipate came out, I saw it slowly filter into some blue-based Modern decks. Ultimately, I think people realized that it wasn’t the Ponder or Preordain replacement they actually wanted, and the hype seems to have died down. What people seem to forget is that Telling Time has been legal the whole time and has basically seen no play.
Of course, Telling Time is slightly worse than Anticipate since it’s pretty likely your top three cards only have 0-1 cards you actually want in any given situation, so Telling Time forces you to keep an extra bad card on top. With fetchlands, you can make that downside less of an issue by shuffling away the top card (although there is a non-zero amount of downside to that as well since if you purposefully put some cards you didn’t want on the bottom, the fetchland shuffles them back into your deck).
Basically, neither Telling Time nor Anticipate is quite good enough for Modern. That said, Telling Time does one thing that Anticipate does not, and that is potentially set up the top card of your deck for a Miracle. The best way to utilize that is probably in a U/W Control deck with Terminus.
Terminus nails everything. Voice of Resurgence, Kitchen Finks, and the like may as well not have a dies trigger when Terminus is in the mix. It’s a high risk, high reward type of card, and that type of thing tends to thrive in Modern where the power level is so high. We even have Condescend to further set up Terminus!
Creatures (6)
Planeswalkers (3)
Lands (15)
Spells (36)
