This week’s Midweek Magic event on Arena is “Omniscience Draft”. You do a bot draft and then throw out just five of your 45 cards, because you have an emblem that says you can cast spells from your hand for free and you can add WUBRG once a turn.

Maybe your brain automatically corrected that to “you can cast a spell for free once per turn.” I know I kept re-checking the rules as I was drafting, because I was sure that I was missing something. But no, you just dump your hand on turn one, and your opponent does the same, and then you see what’s what. Every game is decided in the first turn or two, and once it is, the loser never waits around to see it play out, and who can blame them?

I don’t like to sound ungrateful; Midweek Magic events are usually free, they’re a nice change of pace, overall I really appreciate them. But this one is kind of unbearable.

If you do decide to play this one, here’s your pick order:

1. Anything that draws more than one card.
2. The biggest creatures you can find. Evasion is good as usual. Deathtouch is better than usual because you’ll need to be able to block enormous creatures immediately.
3. Creature removal.
4. Smaller creatures.
5. Combat tricks.
6. For some unknowable reason there are lands in the packs. Do not take them. You might think you’re going to set up some cute combo with a card that cares about your land count, or pay some activation cost that needs two mana of the same color. Ask yourself how that strategy stacks up against a turn-one [[Rust Goliath]].

There have been a few Arena events lately where the premise seems to be “what if everybody just played bananas powerful cards all the time?” I will never understand why that sounds like fun to some people. Magic cards have mana costs for a reason.