Alright, bear with me here, because I’m gonna be digging into the past. Way into the past. Almost a decade and a half into the past. But trust me, there’s a point buried deeper in here. Are you with me so far? Alright. For those who aren’t too familiar with Odyssey block, please look at the following card and try to evaluate it. Yes, I know it’s not fair to look at cards in a vacuum, but imagine that you’re a brand new player and this is the first card in your very first booster pack. Ready? Alright. Here we go:

If you were a brand new player opening your first booster pack, I’d imagine your reaction would go something like “Why does my booster have one less card in it than it says on the front?” Slightly discouraged, you flip through the rest. Here’s another one of your commons:

Okay, that’s a pretty neat effect, except why would I want to discard one of my awesome giant elementals for it? You keep going and reach the uncommons:

I… What? Discard a card to draw a card? That doesn’t do anything. Sacrifice it to draw another card? At that point, I’m just paying 4 mana to turn one card into another card… How is Inspiration not better than this? What? But wait, wait, this is where you open your rare, the exciting part of the pack, the part where you get to open your giant exciting monster and you find:

OH FUCK YES AN 8/8 WITH FLYING THIS IS THE COOLEST THING EVER WHO CARES IF IT’S 11 MANA, IT’S…

Hm?

Oh, that’s what your friend Joe opened? Well, okay, I guess. I mean, you do wish you had gotten this awesome creature, but I mean, the expansion symbol’s some kind of awesome dragon wurm thingie. It has to be good, right? Maybe you’ll open that awesome vampire guy on the booster art. You flip over your rare and see:

At this point, you start to wonder if you could maybe take Joe in a fight and how much trouble you might get in if you do.

If you’ve never played with Odyssey block, you’re probably wondering what the hell all this shit is and how all this terribleness makes any sense. Well, rest assured that there is some method to the madness (HAH!). Here’s two examples of why dumping your cards into your yards is totally fo shizzle or something:

Do you see it yet? When you put it up like that, it totally makes sense, doesn’t it? You wanna fill up your graveyard for Threshold and you’re fine with discarding cards from your hand to give a shitty little 1/1 flying repeatedly, because it lets you play big creatures for cheap. Here’s a couple more examples from the other sets in the block:

You see it now, yes? You see how these cards are pretty awesome if you have a lot of cards in your graveyard? Well, here’s the thing. A lot of new players are not gonna make that connection. Sure, if they open something like a Krosan Beast, they might feel inclined to build a deck around it, because HOLY SHIT IT’S AN 8/8 IF I CAN JUST DO THIS ONE THING? But if they see something like Cabal Ritual or Arrogant Wurm, they’re probably more likely to think “Well, that’s kinda neat, I guess, but I don’t wanna build my deck around these two or three cards, so this 1/1 for 1U that ruins my awesome deck is still really bad”. Heck, that connection might even be too much for some new players. Odyssey was the hot new stuff on the shelves when I started, and it was certainly too much for me. I just saw the Madness spells as spells that I could cast normally with an upside if someone used discard against me. I saw Threshold as a mechanic that allowed my stuff to become better as the game went on and things died. No, I was not very smart, but that’s just how I was thinking at the time.

Now, Odyssey block did have one other mechanic that has since been reused (Outside of Time Spiral block, which reused tons of old keywords for nostalgia). Namely Flashback.

Flashback was a great mechanic, which is probably why it was recycled in Innistrad block (More on that in a moment). Looking at this card, you might also notice that the flashback cost is cheaper in terms of mana. This is absolutely intentional – it allows you to discard it with something like our friend Putrid Imp and draw 2 cards for only 2 mana, circumventing the sometimes-downside of having to cast it at 4 first. All of this is very clever and inventive. So why is it that this block was extremely unpopular among most players at the time? Well, I mentioned one thing above, which is that the synergy between cards, and the sheer amounts of synergy they had were often not immediately obvious to a newer player or someone who simply cracks a few boosters of every set rather than reading through spoilers or buying tons of product. This demographic, at least at the time, represented the vast majority of Magic players. In a time where the internet was far less wide-spread, finding a list of all the cards in a set could prove challenging. This is around the time my household first got an internet connection – I wasn’t even aware of such a thing as full set spoilers.

The set came about because Mark Rosewater wanted to see how far he could stretch design and, in his words, “turn card advantage on its head”. In that way, I think it was a huge success. Odyssey block, even now, is incredibly interesting to look through. It has a lot of interactions and intriguing little things to notice that fit together in ways that might not be immediately obvious. As such, it was a very good set for a small part of the demographic – the very most Spike-y one. It’s not that Odyssey block was bad design – indeed, in many ways, it’s actually really, really well designed. It’s that it was too narrow in scope. It didn’t reach a wide enough audience. For those who did get it, it was amazing. For those who didn’t, it was a full block of “How is THIS a rare?”

So what can we learn from looking at Odyssey block? Well, Odyssey was the first real attempt at a graveyard-based block in Magic. Sure, there had been some graveyard themes here and there in the past, but Odyssey block was almost entirely made of cards that cared about the graveyard, discarded stuff, wanted to be discarded, sacrificed things, etc. Since then, another graveyard-focused block has been made. Namely Innistrad (See, I told you we’d get back to it!). Innistrad was a smash success and is today held up as one of the all-time greatest first two sets from a block of all time, and it’s not hard to see why. The horror flavour really worked despite being incredibly cheesy and clicheed, and the mechanics were good. They even brought back Flashback. Innistrad, however, was not the successor to Odyssey block. Sure, they both cared about the graveyard, and sure, they both used Flashback, but that’s about where the similarities end. Innistrad was much less about using the graveyard as a resource, with a few exceptions, and more about getting your stuff back from the graveyard or having your stuff act weird when it or something else went to the graveyard.

Now, is that to say that Innistrad block was bad? By no means. Innistrad was amazing and it accomplished exactly what it set out to do for the first two sets. I personally adore Innistrad and I absolutely thinks it deserves to be held up as one of the all-times high points of Magic design. But it simply was not the same thing Odyssey block was. Odyssey block was for the discerning, calculating player. Making mechanics like Threshold or Madness work took some thinking, even if that thinking was just “Hm, maybe I should add some more discard outlets”. Undying doesn’t really take any thinking at all – it’s essentially just reverse Persist. Persist, but your guy comes back stronger! Hooray! It’s a fine mechanic, but it’s also very emblematic of how much Innistrad is not a do-over of Odyssey block.

So if we were to make Odyssey block today, if we were to give it another try, but this time actually attempt to make it work for everyone – how would we do that? Well, it’s an idea that I like tinkering with when I have spare time, because I think it’s an interesting thought experiment. Personally, I think it’s important to make the players want to do the things that lead to good decks in the format. Reward them with more than just incremental advantages. It’s difficult to figure out how exactly to go about this, but one example could be a card that can mill either player. A new player will want to put this into their deck in order to mill the opponent, but might later realise that they actually wanna use it on themselves more of the time. This is a way to “trick” the player into making the correct move. Another option could be granting the player some kind of effect with what initially seems like a downside attached. Discard a card, then deal damage equal to its mana cost to target creature. Well, what if that card had flashback or did something when in your graveyard? Over time, the player would probably come to realise that sometimes (s)he would just wanna dump any card, even if they didn’t have something they could use again. Or you could have cards like the Judgment Incarnation cycle that give you an effect when in the graveyard:

All of these are obviously just ideas that I’m throwing out, and far from an exhaustive list. But what I’m trying to get across here is that I genuinely think Wizards sometimes need to go back to designs that didn’t work and try to improve on them. Odyssey was a great concept with a lacking execution (Or at least one that didn’t appeal to most players). I personally believe that if Wizards wanted to, they could absolutely redo this concept of changing the idea of card advantage in a way that wouldn’t leave players scratching their heads. I find it unlikely that they will, because they are at the end of the day a business, and they do need to make sure that their product sells. But Innistrad block did have hints of this, and it went over pretty well, even though some things were not immediately obvious. I think the design strategy simply needs to be that you cannot force players to act the way you want, but you can gently guide them into doing so. Given the current talent of their R&D team, I absolutely think it could be done, and I would love to see it – even if it is just a pipe dream at the end of the day.