General [Contest] A Good Omen!

[TrainmasterGT]

Hello everyone! It's time for the First Official Cube Engineers Custom Card Design Contest!

Prompt:
Design a custom creature card, preferably a Dragon, with an Omen.

Full Regulations:
–The card must be a Creature and have an Omen, either Instant or Sorcery.
–The card does not need to have a render with art, but should contain all relevant mana costs, card types, spell names, text, power, and toughness.
–While the card does not need to be a dragon, cards featuring dragons will be favored.
–All submissions should be posted on the Riptidelab Forum thread or sent to TrainmasterGT on Discord. Forum thread submissions are preferred.
–Limit one submission per person.

For Renders:
–Please do not use AI art.
–Please credit the artist. If no artist accreditation can be found, include a link to the source page.
–You can use the standard Adventure frame if your card design program of choice does not have the Omen frame yet.
–Please include the Omen reminder text if there is room on your render.

Judging:
The winner will be selected by the following panel of Judges:
@TrainmasterGT
@safra
@Chris Taylor

Deadline: May 28th, 2025

The contest winner will receive a special prize (roughly $10-$20 USD in value), to be announced at a later date!

 

[Luckylooter]

Hello Trainmaster! My entry is inspired by some speculation I read during spoiler season: "I hope there's a red Dragon that encourages Dragon typal in standard, I want to run it like I used to when DTK came out." The only Red dragon that kind of does so is Stormscale Scion, and the rare Omen "cycle" is only in Blue, Black, and Green! So my entry seeks to flesh out that Omen cycle by including an entry in Dragons' primary color.

The design itself is meant to evoke the Dragonstorm decks that were popular around Time Spiral, a little nod to the past some older players associate with Tarkir Dragonstorm's name. The Omen fuels the titular spell while also putting a target for it back into the library, and the creature side functions as a haste lord for Dragons that you Storm out, or ramp out with mana dorks, Treasures, Rituals, or most appropriately in TDM draft: Dragonstorm Globe. Thanks for reading!

 

[tachyzoite]

I made an account just for this! Here is my entry:



One of my beefs with the new Omens is that they don't seem to be telling a cohesive story. Sometimes the Omen and the Dragon have symmetry or related effects, but most seem like an afterthought. This is in contrast to the Adventure mechanic which tells a linear story. I think this feels jarring to me and is an immediate point of comparison due to the card frame. Mechanically they occupy a different space and their flavor could further highlight that.

Adventures leads to their main card. You can cast either side, but maximizing the card's value means casting Adventure into its main card. Each side of an Adventure card is usually weaker than if that effect was its own card as you can get both effects for one card. Omens are shuffled into your deck after cast so an Omen's main card may never materialize. You are reliant on drawing it again to get that payoff which means individual effects can be stronger. I think this could be a great flavor success. With this card, I was hoping to design a Dragon side that would benefit from multiple Omens. Each repeated Omen is a sign that the Dragon is coming and that Dragon's effect is more pronounced with more Omens cast. The other plus side is that Dragon Egg already exists as a card and token.

 

[TabbuneBot]

Harbinger of the Feast
Creature - Dragon
As an additional cost to cast this spell, sacrifice a creature.
Flying, Haste

5/5
----
Dragon Feeders
Sorcery - Omen

Create two 1/1 red Goblin creature tokens. (Then shuffle this card into its owner's library)

 

[henrizzlebear]

Thank you for running this contest. My submission is targeting an uncommon signpost power level, with the open ended "Devour Tokens" giving it potential in lower power cube environments.

As I see it, the flavor of Dragon cards having Omens attached to them is that the Omens are signs that the dragon is nearby: broken branches, scorched earth, missing livestock. This is translated mechanically to shuffling the card back in after casting the Omen; you are showing your opponent that this dragon is in the area, and that they should watch out.

 

[TheLameSauce]

I really wanted to design a Dragon/Omen combo that both clearly worked together, but didn't become too much of a lunchable.
I started out with more of a symmetrical land destruction idea, but balancing that proved incredibly difficult and was taking away from the resulting design.
I know the cost is very aggressive on both halves, but I think it asks you to jump through enough hoops and is easy enough to answer that it isn't too pushed.

Also, apologies if the card looks a bit funky, the majority of my time was spent making the card frame by hand from a standard M15 frame lol

https://imgur.com/a/T2T4oPt

 

[StrionicAdventurer]

I like to to imagine red cards that let you retrieve things from exile. I'd really love to have a way to recover the cards that I "impulse draw" but can't play right away. It's a recurring theme in my custom designs, and I also really, REALLY want Junk tokens in mainline Magic.

 

[gaytransmulldrifter]

(i was gonna make this look good but got annoyed before i could bother)

The set Scourge (2003) is rather infamous for its failed attempt at a dragon theme. With only four (???) dragons in the whole set and the hilariously broken mechanic Storm stealing the show, Scourge completely failed to deliver on its own premise. What this design presupposes is, what if it hadn't?

In this timeline, Scourge built upon the groundwork laid in Invasion and Odyssey blocks, with things like the split cards, the battlemages, and the Flashback mechanic. This era of Magic was the beginning of R&D understanding how appealing modal cards can be, the deep well of design space available in sticking two slightly below-rate effects on the same card. This was the time of Krosan Tusker. Scourge continued this trend by introducing the Omen mechanic, a clever solution to the "how do you get good players to put the cool dragons in their deck" problem that plagued early magic design.

Limited house Shivan Coastglider is a riff on previous designs like Assault//Battery and Firebolt, a below-rate Shock variant with some extra late-game value. I think if Wizards were sticking creatures on split cards in this era they would likely be pretty understatted and simple, you weren't exactly getting square stats for your mana value on a flier with upside in those days. So I thought a 6 mana 4/4 would feel right at home. Shoreline Ranger is a 3/4 flier for 5U with islandcycling from the same set, and I felt like a bump up to uncommon and an extra pip deserved another point of power and made the guy feel more like a dragon.

The flavor is inspired by the card Shivan Reef, always thought that was a really evocative name for a blue/red land. Split cards were also all two different colors at that time so a blue/red card felt appropriate

Coastglider was a staple of higher powered 540 cubes throughout the 2000s and is constantly subject to "Is Coastglider still good in 2025??" posts on /r/mtgcube. Peasant and old border cube guys still swear by it.

 

[Onderzeeboot]

Colorless dragons... we don't have enough of them. And by colorless, I mean colorless. Not those knock-off artifact wannabe's like Tek, Draco, or even Boulderborn Dragon from Tarkir: Dragonstorm itself! No, I mean proper, color-agnostic, fearsome flyers! Obviously, Tarkir: Dragonstorm reintroduces the three-color clan system, and with that comes the need for fixing. We also want a high as-fan of dragons to get the story across to the player. My solution? A colorless dragon!



You'll have to forgive me for the lack of a colorless Omen, the tool I used doesn't have a colorless frame for Omen cards, so I had to use the land frame. I blame WotC for not printing enough fricking colorless dragons! Anyway, on to the card. You absolutely have to work for that 5/5 stat line in limited, but it's there for those enterprising drafters who like going above and beyond for a cheeky splash color or two outside of the accepted clan structure. For more conservative drafts this is a perfectly acceptable way to primarily fix your mana and eventually land an acceptable 3/3 flyer for . I think it's obvious from the rarity and effects that I aimed for a limited card, as I tried for something that really can embed itself into the set, and not just be a glorious outlier. Cheers!

 

[Nanonox]

What tool are people using to build the customs btw? All of your cards look really good!

 

[StrionicAdventurer]

What tool are people using to build the customs btw? All of your cards look really good!

I'm always using CardConjurer if I'm designing a one-off card. I don't think they have Omen frames yet, but the Adventure frame looks fine to me. I kind of wish Omen frames had a little bit of reptilian flair to them, so they'd stand out a bit better.

 

[mycr0ft]

I wanted to play around with the general approach in Dragonstorm of having the Omen be an inexpensive effect that lets you get some value out of the card early while waiting to gather enough mana to cast the larger dragons. In this case, we have an inexpensive dragon that would make a decent top-end for a mostly- or mono-white aggressive deck as its primary use. While I couldn't find any art that I liked, my idea for the art would be a luminous dragon that would appear as a "second sun" in the sky. The incandescence of the dragon also gives a flavor reason for the ward and the "blinding light" etb which is really there to help the aggressive deck push damage.

 

[Nanonox]

I thought it would be cool to design around the fact that you are going to be able to draw your Omen again and again over the course of a game. Not only that, but to try and make a card that gets better the more times you draw it.

One way to make sure of seeing a card more often is by milling yourself. But what if that Omen also promised a slow and impending doom for your opponent? And what if it were cast on the very first turn of the game, announcing a future of misery?

Athryxis compounds on that misery by giving you an easy and enticing target to deal with, but at a cost. Mill five might not be a lot the first time you answer it, but it will be a lot tougher the next times. To keep with the foreboding tone set by the Omen, if you deal with the dragon, it goes back into your library as a future draw.

Other than the story this card tells, it's also a draft challenge to make the most of it. Some sort of Baron deck with self-mill elements and targeted recursion is likely the best home for it. It would also be fine as a low opportunity cost control finisher, thanks to the Omen (it's weird by the way that there aren't more one mana loot instant or sorcery cards).

Designing the card was a ton of fun, I might get a liking for this sort of thing. Thanks for the contest Train!

 

[LadyMapi]

Dumb idea:

Moment of Serenity -
Sorcery - Omen
Shuffle up to three target cards from a single graveyard into their owners' library. Draw a card. (Then shuffle this card into its owner's library)

~~//~~

Tyrant of Memory -
Creature - Dragon (R)
Flying, Haste
When Tyrant of Memory enters the battlefield, return a card at random from your graveyard to your hand.
Fossil Find says that random regrowths are fine in red, and you can't take that from me.
4/4

(I wanted to make the dragon side Vengeful Rebirth on a stick, but I figured that that would be too wordy.)

 

[TekLazar]

Since the invasion of Muraganda by racecar drivers, it seems statistically likely that the world ooze will consume a dragon. Thus, a Glop of Dragon.


Glorp is a mostly colorshifted pillage. It's probably too strong for standard, but it's been over 10 years since bramblecrush, and I think those 1/1 oozes will keep it from being too oppressive. It being a 4 of and shuffling back to the deck will give players flashbacks of those casual acidic slime bounce decks that everyone has played at least once.
I picture the constant sound effect played in everyone's head to be like this.
I almost forgot about how trample interacts with deathtouch, it being a 5/5 would have been really strong. Now you gotta use pump and equipment to get those shenanigans.

I keep on shifting how competitive I want this card to be, (thought about nerfing glorp by it making a 2/2, or glop costing 7) but it really just needs playtesting.