Odyssey: A Retro Design Review

With this week’s retro review, I’m trying a few things a little differently. I’m leaving our last block hanging incomplete, pivoting to my first old-border review with 2001’s Odyssey, Magic’s first set built around the graveyard.

The other difference from prior weeks: while I had my criticisms of Alara block, I view those sets mostly positively. I can’t say that for Odyssey, as much as I might love some of its individual cards. Odyssey’s good intentions are warped by a flawed premise, mistaking skill expression as the only acceptable version of fun. That said, even for a set that’s fundamentally misguided, there are still plenty of lessons to apply to our current-day cubes. But don’t take my word for it – the Scryfall link is below; pull it up and let’s go digging in the graveyard!

set:Odyssey

The thing that scares me most about Odyssey isn’t that Mudhole got printed. It’s a good idea to print a backstop to the new strategy you’re pushing, and Threshold was a new thing. But Mudhole’s existence implies that one or more game designers were excited at the idea of seeing Mudhole in the rare slot of a $4 booster, and instead of those designers being summarily institutionalized, they were given the keys to Odyssey’s kingdom!

set:Odyssey r:r

The Mudhole Design Ethos finds full fruition in four rare utility lands – count ‘em, for God’s sake, four – whose abilities appear to be entirely useless. (One or two of them have combo applications; the others are, indeed, useless.) Five more rare “color-fixing” lands in ODY that regularly color- and mana-screw their owner (not that anyone would get the joke until they draw multiples mid-game). There are, alas, one hundred and one other rares besides these. I particularly appreciate the pairing of Extract with three Black rares that hate on duplicate cards – how lucky that they coexist in ODY with a full cycle of Muscle Burst lookalikes! You Echo ‘em if they’re foolish enough to believe the Burst theme, and you Extract ‘em if they’re foolish enough to play around the Burst hate. Having a good time yet?

So many of Odyssey’s rares are a joke at the expense of anybody stupid enough to believe Magic could be fun! Yes, there’s Call of the Herd, which is stone-cold awesome, but it’s the lush mirage in a barren salty desert. Call of the Herd reminds you that ODY looked greatness full in the face… and blew a big fat raspberry at it.

Rare Magic cards are primarily a mechanism to create artificial scarcity (doubly so for premium aesthetic treatments). But I love infrequent power outliers in Limited: they deprioritize skill expression, giving the schoolyard dreamers a chance to compete with Mr. Moneybags Drafts-a-Lot. Even more important, Magic has long maintained the precedent that rare = exciting, powerful, in the same way that Americans know red = stop and green = go. It’s fine to have some aspirational weirdos or the occasional Constructed plant, but completely inverting rarity’s symbolism with a hundred-odd fiddly unlikeable sideboard cards is a dereliction of duty.

Okay, so your job is to design Magic’s first graveyard-matters mechanics, and you’ve come up with Flashback and Threshold:

set:Odyssey (o:flashback OR o:threshold)

I kinda love that these two mechanics are anti-synergistic. Magic’s graveyard in 2001 tended to only go up in size, and it’s cool that Flashback asks you to shrink it instead, while sharing similar enablers. (Would I simultaneously print not one, but two dedicated hate cards? Maybe if hell freezes over. Probably not otherwise.) But it’s the support pieces that really bug me.

Remember, the goal is to put 7 cards in grave – not trivial to do in most Limited games. Well, looting and its variants are usually fun. Self-mill is a freebie bit of trinket text. Maybe fetchlands, Cycling, or other self-binning versions of staple effects. You’d be forgiven for thinking so, but we’re living in the Mudhole, baby, so every card needs to be riddled with drawbacks and fiddly trinket text to punish scrubs:

set:ody (o:'discard any' or o:'discard a card:')

As it turns out, the easiest methods Odyssey provides to hit Threshold are Mind Twisting, Wastelanding, and otherwise blowing up your own stuff. If it’s a game state Magic players usually dread, then you know Odyssey will have at least five commons that ask us to inflict it on ourselves.

This is the paradox of Odyssey, why so many older players I know extol the set, why some of its cards are irresistible. Our usual heuristics go like this: a card is worth at least +3/+3 until end of turn; more lands are better; a permanent is worth more in play than in the yard; and rares are the most fun card in the pack. It can be, occasionally, really fun when these expectations are subverted. Like a joke that hinges on an unexpected twist, these surprises can invite whimsy, curiosity, and a sense of discovery, especially for the world-weary players who think they’ve already seen the punchline.

But if you push the subversion too hard, then the joke becomes an in-group reference: not actually funny anymore, only a good tool to humiliate outsiders. Odyssey found a way to turn unappealing card disadvantage into combat blowouts, and it pushed and pushed and pushed. Torment will soon introduce the Madness mechanic, but if Madness needed to combine flash and mana-cheat to make discarding fun, that sounds like an admission of Odyssey’s guilt.

And I haven’t even gotten to Standst–

I did mention “irrestistible cards” earlier. How about we get to those?

Flashback, as a buyback-adjacent mechanic, inherently runs the risk of staleness. Roar of the Wurm and Call of the Herd represent the best of what Flashback can offer, each with a unique play pattern. Roar is a simple emergent puzzle, offering a vastly over-rate 6/6 if you can bin it, but players will still have to make do with a 7-mana 6/6 in the games where they get unlucky. That variability leads to dynamic gameplay. On the other hand, Call of the Herd offers excellent beef, but you’d be a little sad to discard or mill it, even though it’s still technically “card advantage,” which speaks to its inherent appeal. (I also really like Reckless Charge and Skull Fracture for other Flashback cards whose context naturally changes as the game goes long.)

A few more rares deserve a shout. Terravore and the other Lhurgoyfs provide another axis of graveyard-matters that’s similar to Threshold, but interacts more positively with each color’s strengths. Kamahl, Pit Fighter’s Haste makes the interplay between Ball Lightning and Lightning Bolt really, really shine – sometimes you’ll want to skip his card advantage for 6 to the dome, but his 1 toughness provides plenty of counterplay from the opponent (like every removal spell ever, or a million Goblins). Wayward Angel offers big stats, stunning art, and a story-on-a-card that’s far ahead of its time.

Early Magic cards were a mixed bag, aesthetically. The majority of ODY’s artworks maximize the potential of the illustration medium, perfectly accentuate Magic’s first cardframe, and evoke the high-fantasy bestuary from which Magic originally drew its flavor. Many pieces display a level of abstraction, or express the artist’s personal style, to a degree that was lost in the 2010s and early 2020s. ODY’s art is often stunning, and its foil treatments are clear complements to the overall style (whereas in the 2020s, foiling resembled artificial scarcity with a Pringle-inspired topology).

But the art direction that enabled this proliferation of beautiful art also produced some real dorks:

Though all of these pieces are executed with utmost skill, the tone is uneven. Some pieces are goofy as heck, and others are melodramatic. It’s impossible to tell what Odyssey’s story is through its cards. (I see a Buffy reference that’s visually about as important as whoever Seton and Atogatog are.)

Another curious trend is old Magic’s fascination with fascinators – that is, with impractical headgear that the ’80s must have deemed wizardly. A lot of cowls and coiffeurs. A few miters. A bonnet or a wimple, perhaps.

Combined, these foibles lend even ODY’s silliest cards an undeniable, if naïve, charm. However, recent sets like EOE and BLB make me think Magic has improved at controlling the tone of their artwork while still allowing plenty of artistic expression.

On power level, Odyssey is extremely chunky, with a big band of Vintage Cube all-stars, a tranche of has-beens that still hang with 2010s cards, and some simple, functional roleplayers for a huge range of cubes. Each card probably needs to be weighed individually, but my starting heuristic would be that ODY’s non-creatures tend to be drastically more powerful than its creatures.

As for transferable design lessons of Odyssey, I start here: Novelty does not necessitate fun. When new play patterns repeatedly violate player intuition, don’t force that on drafters as the only viable strategy. Give them some genuinely cool rares, so that they’ll discover your synergies just by playing with cards they like.

Thanks as always for reading. Stay frosty, and until next time, remember: It offers you what you want, not what you need.