Build Your Own Divinations

The first thing we discussed with Leo was that decks should feel like they do powerful and fun things, but they shouldn’t be too powerful. Once the Cube was built, a friend of ours described it as a “Build-your-own-Divinations” Cube, which I felt was a good way of putting into words what we wanted to achieve.

Specifically, we wanted players to not be able to go off and draw their entire decks too easily, which meant that card draw in particular shouldn’t come too freely. There would be a very minimal amount of easy, guaranteed card advantage – if you wanted it, you would have to work at least a little bit to get it.

The closest thing to a 《Divination》 is 《Memorial to Genius》, which eats up your mana, comes into play tapped, and is harder to abuse than other card types.

However, there are many more ways to create card advantage without directly drawing cards. For example, 《The Mending of Dominaria》 can net you an additional card, but it hits only specific types of cards and acts on a delay. 《Wispweaver Angel》 can also provide card advantage, but only if you have something good to blink with it. 《Deadly Visit》 can produce value by surveilling a flashback card to the graveyard.

Little streams like this can add up to players building resources, getting to do things that feel powerful and having lots of meaningful decisions without enabling broken decks that kill on the first turn of the game. When the card advantage engines require different synergies to work, the drafting phase is more dynamic and decks end up with distinct identities.

Create Choices

That leads us to another downside of the card 《Divination》 itself: having no restrictions means that it’s going to be good in every OmniCube deck ever, and it doesn’t lead to any significant decisions. That makes it a very boring card in this context.

Another way to increase the amount of choices is to add focus on resources that players are restricted by. I find it funny that maybe the clearest example of this in the OmniCube format is actually focusing on mana.

While the 《Omniscience》 emblem lets you cast spells for free, it doesn’t help in activating abilities or paying additional costs. If you have multiple cards with activation costs, or multiple cards with kicker, you have to choose which ones to spend your limited amount of mana on.

This principle is clearly visible in some individual card choices, like including 《Ghitu Chronicler》 and 《Blink of an Eye》, but not 《Repulse》 and 《Archaeomancer》. Not only do the kicker versions of these cards lead to more choices in the games, but they also prevent the decks from becoming too powerful and going off too easily, since the kickerless versions form a two card combo that immediately draws your entire deck.

There are many cards in Magic’s history that have similar but slightly different effects, just like 《Repulse》 and 《Blink of an Eye》. You don’t want the cube to be cluttered with cards that are too similar to each other, so in these cases we prioritized the ones that would lead to the most interesting decisions in both drafting and game play.

Another way to make mana matter are cards like 《Expansion/Explosion》: the front side is playable but not exciting on its own, but the back side is a powerful payoff that incentivizes you to find ways to create additional mana.

Prioritize Recognizable Cards

When opening up a pack of cards in a Cube draft, it’s a lot easier to mentally parse the contents of the pack if the cards are ones that you’re already familiar with, or at least easily recognizable. Prioritizing iconic cards makes the Cube much more accessible and fun to players who haven’t played that particular Cube before.

While this applies to all other Cubes as well, I find it particularly important in OmniDraft, as you can’t even put your “blinders on” and ignore cards that aren’t in your colors. If you have to read every card in the draft, it quickly becomes tedious instead of fun.

The amount of text on the cards also factors into this. If a card is elegant and simple in design, taking in the information doesn’t take long. One good practice is to consciously avoid cards with either irrelevant text or confusing phrases, even if they might otherwise fit the Cube.

For example, I would avoid adding something like 《Defiler of Instinct》, since half of the text box is spent on an ability that doesn’t actually matter.

No Tutors

Another clear rule we wanted to have was not including any tutor effects, unless they are for a very good purpose. Tutor effects simply take a lot of time as the players first need to go through their decks and then shuffle the decks afterwards.

I think banning fetchlands in Pioneer right at the inception of the format was one of the best ban decisions Wizards of the Coast has ever made, and we wanted to apply a similar principle here.

There are currently a couple of exceptions to the rule, but it’s at least good to minimize the amount of those cards even if they’re not completely banned.

Graveyard Recursion and Self-Mill

One of the easiest ways to create card advantage without actually drawing cards is letting the players recur cards from their graveyard. Recursion is a naturally slow way to build resources and doesn’t contribute to the problem of going through your deck in one turn, so it’s ideal for this purpose.

A logical pairing for graveyard recursion, flashback and so on, are cards that put other cards in the graveyard.

One of my favorite things to do in the Cube is tutoring up a 《Worldheart Phoenix》 with 《Corpse Connoisseur》. Talk about value!

Go Wide / Tokens

Going wide is also possible, but a little bit different than in other formats. Many token makers create a few copies of small tokens, which is simply not a powerful enough thing to do in this format. Token makers in OmniCube have to either create bigger tokens than usual, tokens with abilities, be repeatable effects, or have some other form of synergy.

Payoffs for the token theme often include being able to sacrifice the tokens for some kind of benefit instead of mass pumps.

Artifacts and Enchantments

Another clear choice for an interesting theme was artifacts, and to a lesser extent also enchantments. There are a lot of artifacts and many artifact payoffs printed over the years, so there’s plenty to choose from.

Note that this theme can easily overlap with the previous two: 《Whirler Rogue》 and 《Precursor Golem》 go in the token theme as well, and 《Ovalchase Daredevil》 and 《Hanna, Ship’s Navigator》 work well together with self-mill.

Cards that create Treasure tokens serve multiple purposes here as they can both boost the artifact synergies and enable cards that have costs that can’t be otherwise paid for.

Instants and Sorceries

“Spells Matter” is a classic theme across Magic formats. As a deviation from the norm though, in OmniCube this theme can’t rely much on cards that say “Draw a Card”. Cantrips that would support this archetype would be great in every other deck as well since there is practically no cost in playing them, and thus we had to look a bit harder for thematic cards that would work well here.

The good news is that many of the interactive spells in the Cube are incidentally instants and sorceries, which means that you can pair the proactive payoffs with cards that disrupt your opponent and prevent them from progressing their own game plan.

Many of the payoffs for instants and sorceries also overlap with other themes. 《Jeskai Ascendancy》 was already mentioned in the go wide section, and cards like 《The Mouth of Sauron》 and 《Charmbreaker Devils》 benefit from being played alongside graveyard recursion and self-mill.

Enters the Battlefield

Repeatedly triggering enters the battlefield effects is also another nice way to create value without drawing cards. Cards like 《Glimmerpoint Stag》, 《Aether Tradewinds》 and 《Ephemerate》 can boost many kinds of synergies. These cards can be a little bit dangerous though, because some of them might enable combos that are too powerful.

For example, 《Archaeomancer》 can go off very easily with the bounce spells, and 《Man-o’-War》 bouncing itself can give you infinite triggers from other cards for free, like 《Hazoret’s Monument》. Each half of these combos can be very innocuous on its own, but you have to be careful not to include both of them in the Cube.

One of the upsides of this theme is that it ties in very well with the other themes and it’s easy to find overlap. There are, for example, many token makers and artifacts with enters the battlefield triggers.

Size Matters

We’ve also tried some themes that didn’t play out as well as we thought they would. One of them was big creature beatdowns, which was basically meant to be this Cube’s version of an aggro deck. The idea was that you could try to force big creatures through and win a game that way, without focusing on synergies of the other themes. Some cards that belonged in this category were 《Gravitic Punch》, 《Ajani, Caller of the Pride》 and 《Angelic Gift》.

There was one big problem with this theme though: it was simply not fun. If the big creatures had useful abilities, they would be too powerful, and if they didn’t they would be boring. Cards like 《Gravitic Punch》 were also very hit-or-miss: either it does nothing, or it ends the game on the spot. Neither outcome would result in a fun game.

Some of the cards are still left in the Cube because they can be nice on their own, but support for the overarching theme was dropped.

However, thinking about big cards led us to think about a much more fun challenge: how to make small cards matter. With 《Omniscience》 in play, it’s easy to make casting expensive cards rewarding. But how do you reward players for drafting cheap cards?

Turns out there are a few ways to do that as well. 《Serra Paragon》 rewards you for having cheap permanents in your graveyard and 《Recruitment Officer》 churns through your deck to find them. Unlike expensive cards, cheap ones can also be cast off things like 《Vivien, Champion of the Wilds》. (Note that you need to pay the actual mana cost for the cards in exile).

Counters

Another theme that didn’t go very far was a “Counters Matter” theme that included cards like 《Incremental Growth》 and 《Botanical Brawler》. Some of the issues here were finding cards of appropriate power level, and especially finding overlap with the other themes. Pursuing the theme didn’t feel like enough of a reward.

Some of the individual cards from this theme are also still remaining, as they were individually interesting enough, and there are incidental ways to support them.