At first I thought this was pretty funny, but even if you were joking, it may actually map to the extinction problem, since each new technology has a chance of making extinction less likely, as well. As an example, nuclear technology had some probability of killing everyone, but also some probability of making Orion ships possible, allowing diaspora.

While I'm gaming the system, my lifetime utility function (if I have one) could probably be doubled by giving me a reasonable suite of superpowers, some of which would let me identify the rest of the cards in the deck (X-ray vision, precog powers, etc.) or be protected from whatever mechanism the skull cards use to kill me (immunity to electricity or just straight-up invulnerability). Is it a stipulation of the scenario that nothing Omega does to tweak the utility function upon drawing a star affects the risks of drawing from the deck, directly or indirectly?