Card of the Day: Omen Machine

There’s few things that feel supremely satisfying when playing a game of Magic: countering a counter spell, playing a Deflecting Palm for lethal, removing a table-wide threat. One of my favourites includes forcing everyone to play at the same rate; a lot of people would assume that I would just enjoy playing Stax but everyone’s expecting that and playing Stax pieces would get you hated off the board the moment anyone gets a chance.

Enter Omen Machine: a card that can singlehandedly interrupt the flow of a game of Magic. It keeps everyone from being able to draw cards and make it so you can essentially play your top deck card without paying any associated costs, limiting players to play what’s in their hands and the top card of their deck. It’s not really protected but it’s relatively easy to make artifacts indestructible such as Darksteel Forge and That Which Was Taken.

Let’s say your opponent is setting up for something like a Doomsday combo which counts on keeping Laboratory Maniac or something like it in play and drawing out the remainder of their deck as quickly as possible. If you lay Omen Machine onto the board through this and either has a counterspell or an answer to their win condition in hand, you’re almost absolutely golden for, at the very least, slowing them down so much that their win condition wasn’t even really worth it. It’s not exactly the absolute solution to anything and it’s not overpowered or under costed but it certainly gets the job done in a good match of Commander.

If you feel Omen Machine may not be enough to slow a match down, you can always run chaos cards like Chaos Warp or other great equalizers like Possessed Portal or Timesifter. I feel these kinds of synergies are extremely handy up against decks that plan on going off quickly or ramping at an alarming rate.

Sure, it’s not Winter Orb or Stasis but those cards are well-known and I, admittedly, pulled my copy straight out of a bulk box. I’ve gotten the chance to play it and it causes the same amount of groans every time I do and sometimes… just sometimes… that’s exactly what’s needed for a deck that just plans on durdling around. Of course, one of the bigger beauties of this card is that, as an artifact, it can be played in any deck you want and there are tons upon tons of ways to cheat this out early so you could actually use it in a big costs deck that uses Jodah, Archmage Eternal and Fist of Suns as a backup.

It’s just fun and it’s kind of hard to abuse as it’s not an inherently broken card, which probably explains why it’s so cheap. What do you think of Omen Machine? Have you had any experience playing with it? How did your pods respond to it? Leave a comment below and tell us what you think as well as what you think should be our next card of the day!