After the huge success of Invasion, the pressure was relieved
off Wizards a bit. Old-time players came running back to the game in droves,
and future blocks had a successful block design model to follow. No block for a
long time would be as broadly well-received as Invasion, but that sort of
success is nearly impossible to duplicate.
Here is the point in Magic history where the design gets a
bit more recognizable, the values that Wizards holds are closer to the ones
they currently do, and set reviews will get more controversial. Early Magic
sets are easy: the ones that did something good and new for the first time are
good sets. The underpowered ones that didn’t are bad sets. Power levels swung
widely, and neither extreme was desirable. But with Odyssey, they made
something that some people really
liked. It just wasn’t for everyone.
Invasion’s theme had a broad appeal to it: you have to be a
real curmudgeon not to enjoy playing wild multicolored decks. They widen the
deckbuilding possibilities, they make creativity more possible at tournaments, and
a wider array of colors and strategies are possible, both in constructed and
limited. Odyssey’s theme was… a bit narrower in its appeal. By emphasizing the
graveyard, Odyssey gave a very specific direction to many Odyssey decks.
This isn’t to say that there was only one good Odyssey-era
deck. Quite the opposite: UG Madness and Mono-Black control were block
standouts,[1]
but Odyssey-based decks like Psychatog, RG beatdown, and Cult
Classic Mirari’s Wake made the Standard format very diverse. But Odyssey
started a trend that we’d see through Onslaught and Mirrodin blocks: Standard
as the battle of the block decks using the block mechanics to overwhelm the
less synergy-oriented opposition.
[1] The latter deck made such an impression on its users that people tried to make non-Odyssey versions of it for a decade, in a futile attempt to make up for the lack of Cabal Coffers. It turns out that one of the best lands ever printed is fueling your control deck, it suffers without that card.
A set is more than just some Standard decks, though. Odyssey
attempted to turn Magic theory on its head, and it successfully did so. It
became not just correct, but a core
strategy to discard cards for seemingly no benefit in order to hit
Threshold, both in Constructed or Limited. Throwing out a hallowed bit of Magic’s
foundation might sound like a sort of populist attempt to show tournament
players who the real smart guys are… but this is not what happened.
Tournament players adapt extremely well to cards working
differently in different environments, and they crafted an Odyssey-exclusive
set of theory that served them well. Odyssey block drafting is probably the
height of Magic as a skill-testing game. Do not wager money against a good
player in Odyssey block limited unless you have at least a 90% win rate in the
format.
Odyssey was, at its core, fucking weird. I can confidently
state that it was the Mark Rosewater-iest set ever made, and Wizards internal
dynamics and Rosewater himself have changed enough that nothing can possibly
top it in the future. Rosewater wanted to break new territory with what a “card”
in Magic was, and Odyssey succeeded at that goal marvelously. It had squirrels.
It had goofy names and flavor text, because he was in charge of those. It had a
cycle of bizarre alternate-win cards, because he likes alternate-win cards.
It has cards that read as completely unplayable that are actually rather good,
and cards that read as insultingly
unplayable that are, in fact, just that bad. It has a cycle of Atogs and an
Atog that eats Atogs, with art left over from Unglued 2.
Following Invasion’s brilliant integration of its keyworded
mechanics into its block concept, Odyssey’s mechanics are all-in on the
graveyard theme. Flashback is among the strongest ever designed for Magic, and
it manages to be a lot of things for different styles of player: lower-level
players just like the idea of playing their big cool spells more than once,
while higher-level ones love how all flashback spells essentially say “draw a
card” on the first cast.[2]
It would have been a fine throw-in mechanic in any other block, in a similar
way to how Buyback was, but in a graveyard-devoted set it does a lot more. The
fact that people would be purposefully pitching cards from their hands led to a
lot of four-mana Roar of the Wurms, and actually casting it from one’s hand
was an amusing oddity rather than just someone casting a spell in a game of
Magic. The mechanic is so deceptively powerful that cards with Flashback are
almost across-the-board undercosted, and when Innistrad brought it back, there
would be no Firebolts or Deep Analysis-type business happening.
[2] Credit Zac Hill for this analogy.
Threshold is more complex. The good aspect of it is that it
gave even the lowliest common a very cool best-case scenario, while keeping the
overall power level about where it should be. Unlike Flashback, though, with
cards that you could just play twice and not have to worry about complex ways
to abuse them, Threshold really required you to build around it. You were
either a Threshold deck, and cards with Threshold and their enablers are
fantastic, or you weren’t, and all Threshold cards are wildly underpowered.
Similar to how multicolored cards are allowed to be powerful because not every
deck can play them, Threshold is, on average, somewhere between incredible and
unplayable… but if it’s unplayable, you don’t have to play it.
This also means that games involving a large number of
Threshold cards are pretty straightforward. Can you get to seven cards in your
graveyard, and have your Threshold cards in play? Congratulations, your deck is
better than your opponent’s. Is this good Magic gameplay? I’d say that it’s
fine to have some subset of decks that want to hit a certain point in order to
get their power spike (whether that’s in the form of number of cards in
graveyard, or seven mana, or five creatures, or no cards in hand), but it’s not
a good idea to have such a high percentage of a set’s booster pack to rely on
this one mechanic. There probably should have been 10% as many cards with
Threshold, and a different, more general mechanic in its place.
Not enough credit goes to the block structure of Odyssey.
Instead of relying exclusively on graveyard stuff for three sets, which would
have gotten extremely monotonous, Torment gave us a twist: Magic’s first truly
color-imbalanced set, with black purposefully better and more frequent than
other colors, which were specifically referencing black as a color and its
color identity in its cards. I love this twist.
A good thought experiment for any specific set: can you
plausibly imagine someone saying that it’s their favorite set ever made? If I
stretch, I can imagine that a hardcore “win at any cost” tournament player
could name Odyssey, because it made them win so often. Maybe even someone less
competitive that loves graveyard synergy. With Torment, though, it’s much easier
to imagine. It’s where all the sweet black cards are. Anyone who really loves
black spells is going to like Torment. I’m not that person, but I really
respect Torment’s ability, as a small set, to come along and drastically shake
up both the Limited and Constructed environments that came before. Cards like
Mind Sludge, Mutilate, Faceless Butcher, and the aforementioned Cabal Coffers[3]
were gasp-inducing for people who expected black to contribute some removal to
the black decks, and some bad creatures and more removal to the aggressive
ones.
[3] Well, in a footnote.
Torment came at an important time in black’s history.
Odyssey rotating into Standard marked the first time since the format’s
creation that Dark Ritual wasn’t legal, and lots of people were skeptical. Wasn’t
black defined by its usage of Dark
Ritual, people wondered; what will it even be able to do without ‘B-> BBB’? After
Torment, black certainly had its relative power scaled back from having a
Wrath, the best land, and one of the best creatures (Nantuko Shade), but
Torment had to forcefully demonstrate that there was a competitive future in
the color.
Torment had some other cool ideas in it, but they seemed to
play a minor role. I like the concept of black’s ideology seeping into other
colors and corrupting them, leading us to other colors paying
life for their spells and a
cycle of cards themed on mental illnesses,[4]
but this could have been played up a lot more. Where was black’s side of the
story, showing us that it doesn’t believe itself to be evil, just
self-interested? This is supposedly an aspect of black’s ideology, but a card
named Cabal Torturer isn’t doing them any favors on that front.
[4] Compulsion, Hypochondria, and Narcissism are great names in this vein. Pyromania is way too direct rather than the vague connections the former makes, whereas Mortiphobia is a made-up thing to fit the cycle. This was supposed to be black’s set, damn it! You ruined it all.
And speaking of things named after mental illness, we have
Madness in Torment. It is a powerful mechanic that has the block’s defining
deck named after it, despite only appearing on ten cards (none of which were
rare).[5]
I’m not sure why the mechanic had to be costed as if discarding cards is nearly
impossible. In normal games of Magic, when you discard a card, that card is
gone. Playing the card instead of discarding it, even if it cost twice as much
mana, would still be a great deal: you’d have lost the card otherwise! But
instead of them being costed like it’s an added bonus to use sometimes, it’s a
monstrously large benefit to casting them for their Madness cost. It was such a
powerful ten-card mechanic that it formed the basis of a block deck, which made
a dominant Standard deck, which went on to Extended, then even to Legacy and
Vintage. Aside from its incredible power level, the fact that the good cards
were two in green (supposedly one of Torment’s “bad” colors), one in blue, and
one in red… this probably shouldn’t happen in a “black set.”
[5] Odyssey was a wonderful time to be a low-budget competitive player, because the ideal build of UG Madness had zero rares. Even mono-black control had its heavy hitters weighted toward the lower rarities, too; there’s no way that Coffers would be an uncommon in modern design. Magic designers consider it a horrible mistake that you could be competitive without using rares, which says a lot about Magic as a business.
Of course, the issue of the wrong cards being good became
even more prevalent in Judgment. This was supposed to be the triumphant return
of green and white to the forefront, but… eh. Green was never bad in the first
place, having supplied us with the then-omnipresent Wild Mongrel, but white got
a shockingly low density of playable cards. Judgment provided nothing near
Cabal Coffers-level other than Mirari’s Wake, and that card wasn’t really a green-white
deck powerhouse, it fueled a combo deck. Very different vibe than Torment’s
black cards that worked with other black cards to make a mono-black deck.
Judgment would have been entirely forgettable were it not
for the
cycle of Wishes. Even in white’s own set, it can’t get a break: Golden Wish
is a five-mana embarrassment compared to the aggressively-costed competition.
Black could get anything for 60% of
that mana, and that’s in the set that purposefully made black terrible. That
quibble aside, I love these cards. For years, they let people use sideboards in
a totally different way, and that enabled a lot of creativity: from toolbox
strategies, to A+B combo decks that had one card so important they’d play three
copies of it plus four wishes for it, to other
combo decks that would use Wishes to allow them to pull all the win conditions
from the maindeck entirely.[6]
[6] I am irrationally bitter, though, that the Wishes don’t work as they did at the time they were printed. Back then, the exile zone was “removed from game,” and Wishes could get either sideboard cards or RFG’d ones. Since they did this to themselves, this meant that Burning Wish and Cunning Wish could get themselves. Why is this relevant? Because Mirari, from Odyssey, could copy them, thus letting you chain one into the other, giving you the option of spending five mana to get another sideboard card any number of times. There were some builds of Mirari’s Wake decks that literally do not work without this interaction.
I’d probably have more of an attachment to Odyssey block if
its aesthetic wasn’t so goofy. I haven’t discussed art much in the past few
reviews, but Magic really entered an artistic doldrums with Mercadian Masques,
moving to tightly-controlled style guide-driven work, and losing the
originality of people like Scott Kirschner, Richard Kane Ferguson, Drew Tucker,
and Quinton Hoover. Some of these, like Kirschner, voluntarily moved on to
non-Magic projects. Many of them were thought not to be in line with Magic’s
new ~artistic vision~, and replaced with more generic illustration. And Hoover,
among a few other tragic cases, sees his work transformed into a horrid
soulless husk of its former glory.
It is understandable to want your illustrators to know what
things look like, and to have a coherent idea of what the races are. But when
your ideas are praying
mantis dudes for green, and sentient
squids for blue,[7]
someone should come along and laugh at you until you go back to letting people
paint things that aren’t terrible. Cephalid were an awful idea, and the fact
that their existence in the style guide, their need to be portrayed just so every single time, crowded out
truly original artists’ ability to make the art they wanted is a tragedy.
[7] They decided that they didn’t want Odyssey to use any of the traditional races that had always been in Magic… right before making a tribal block that centers exclusively on the traditional races of Magic. It’s like they purposefully didn’t want cards from one block to be usable with cards from another.
We are finally free of the never-ending Weatherlight saga,
and what does the creative team do? Make a new group of people to replace them!
This is less than ideal. They are free to tell whatever story they want, and
they end up with some sort of incomprehensible mess about the Cabal and pit
fighting and a very angry barbarian, and it continues through Onslaught.
These are reviews, so the question is always: “was this a
good block?” The answer is usually straightforward. Odyssey block is more
complex. Rosewater had a specific vision for Odyssey, and I’d say he mostly got
that across. It set out to turn certain things on their head, and it did. The
block structure, even if Judgment let it down with mediocre execution, was
stronger than almost any block of the era.
Rosewater, in discussing game design as an art, refers to
the need for artists to exercise restraint. He sees Odyssey as a set that he
was designing for himself, rather than for everyone else to play with. He sees
this as a classic mistake that game designers make.
If we connect these ideas, his case that artists need to
restrain themselves, put things into their work only if absolutely necessary,
and make for their audience rather than for themselves… this is all bullshit.
Rosewater and I must enjoy drastically different things. When I think of my
favorite creative works, things like Watchmen by Alan Moore, Infinite Jest by
David Foster Wallace, and The Velvet Underground & Nico, I don’t think of
artists restraining themselves, nor of them trying to make assumptions about
what the audience wants.
The best quote from this is from Raekwon, about the first
Wu-Tang album: “the Wu got something that I know everybody wanna hear, ‘cause I
know I been waitin to hear.” Make the things you wish were made.
An artist does not know their audience. They know
themselves. They can speak the truth as they understand it; they cannot speak
for their audience. Attempting to give people what they want, rather than
making the art they want to make, is inauthentic. It is the path of the hack.
So, while I don’t think Odyssey was a great block in every
way, its failures were mostly failed experiments, or experiments successful in
the wrong ways, rather than straightforward mediocrity. It is an honest block,
because (especially for Rosewater’s vision of a Squirrel-filled pun-laden
Odyssey, and the idea of black taking over a set) it accomplished what it
wanted to. Modern blocks will never experiment this way again, and their
failures are of a much less interesting variety. As a game, we learned a lot
from Odyssey block, both positive and negative: how to make decks reliant on
the graveyard, how “card advantage” is an awful concept, and why blue deserves
a better race than goddamn squid people.
Next week: back to Elves and Goblins. There are still squid,
though. That’s Onslaught.
This is my favorite block! I still have my UG madness deck. I also really like the Cephalid. To each his own. Great article.
ReplyDeletethe mental illness cycle was a cool idea that sort of fell apart after Compulsion. I have no idea how Narcissism is represented by mini-Giant-Growthing. And as you said Mortiphobia is not even a word, I don't get why they didn't just call it "Necrophobia."
ReplyDeleteI appreciate that the Torment/Judgment color imbalance made drafting Odyssey block weird but otherwise I think it's a shame that they won't do something like that again. The idea of a color taking over a set and getting to sort of prove itself or infect/influence the others is really cool. That they messed up with Green and White is all the more reason I wish they'd try it again.
You make a good point about art as a whole: without taking risks and expressing your own feelings, you're not creating anything special. That said, Mark Rosewater is in charge of designing MTG as a product, as well as an art.
ReplyDeleteHe (and Hasbro) can't afford to alienate wide swaths of the Magic community by going off the deep end every now and again. You can certainly argue that recent designs have swung too far in the other direction, as the game is planned two years in advance and R&D churns out hundreds of new cards a year. However, I think it's unfair to Mark to say he's flat-out wrong about restraint. I'm sure he'd love to go wild with design, release a new Un-set every year, but he has other things to work on, and Magic is a behemoth of business and production that is not so easily swayed.
Consider how divisive certain genres of music are--everyone has tastes, and typically strong ones at that. Despite the fun Mark would have designing (and we'd have playing) a new set that really pushes the boundaries, he and Wizards simply can't afford to turn off so many potential customers. Jobs, revenue, and stock prices are on the line.
Entertaining review, by the way! Thanks for posting.
ReplyDeleteU/G Madness is a classic, my son who learned to play magic this year just delights every time this deck is rolled to play on our 36 sided dice. Wonder inspired, turn 4 flying 6/6 wurms? - they are better than dragons!
ReplyDelete