Design Files: Odyssey, Part 4

For the last three weeks, I've been doing a series (Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3) on the cards handed off from Design to Development for Odyssey many years ago. Last week, I showed some cards I handed off that never made it to print (at least in Odyssey). I got through blue, so today, I'm picking up at black.

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Blue wasn't the only color messing around with milling as a cost. This card looks miserable to play against. Seeing cards like this is a fun part of looking back decades at one's early design work.

This was a vertical cycle, with an extra common, that I believe was designed by Richard Garfield, who was on the Odyssey Design team. We ended up moving this effect to Torment where we expanded it to do more than just life loss and put the effect on Nightmare creatures.

One of the themes in black that (mostly) didn't make it to print was a series of cards that removed cards from your graveyard as a cost. It created too much tension with threshold. We did allow for some cards to remove cards from your opponent's graveyard as an effect.

We'd figured out that Dark Ritual was too good but hadn't quite figured out how good it was. We have also moved away from making black mana Rituals in favor of red ones.

This is kind of a cool Hypnotic Specter variant. I like that it comes with some risk that you might occasionally help your opponent. Back in the day, we experimented with doing more of this kind of filtering the opponent's hand as a variation on discard but decided it wasn't worth it.

I obviously really liked this name because I used it on a different card in Odyssey. Both "Zombie Infestation" (the handoff card) and the actual card Zombie Infestation create 2/2 black Zombie tokens, but the printed one is more about using the cards in your hand as a limiter rather than as a cost. The biggest problem is it costs six mana. At that point, you're not likely to have a lot of cards in your hand.

Ekundu Cyclops was a common creature card from Mirage. Its text was simple in concept. It liked to attack, so if any of your creatures attacked, it also attacked. It was flavorful and felt like a common. But there was a problem: players never remembered to attack with their Ekundu Cyclops. Why? Well, players focus on the creatures that are attacking and often forget to check the text of the creatures that aren't attacking. This caused endless headaches in tournaments as attacking with the Cyclops was a required action, but we don't normally like to roll back finished combat.

This was me coming up with a solution. We could make the same card except with one slight tweak. It didn't have to attack, but if it didn't, you had to sacrifice it at end of combat. This version encouraged players to remember the Cyclops's text as there was a consequence. But if they didn't remember or just didn't attack with the Cyclops, there was a clean answer to what happened (and it stops being a headache for judges). However, it turned out we didn't need a fixed Ekundu Cyclops. I was just excited that I came up with one. In the end, the Development team told me "Good job" and took it out.

Richard Garfield designed this card and was quite fond of it. I don't remember why it was cut. It wasn't because we didn't like it, it was just knocked out to make room for something the set needed. To make it up to Richard, we would put this card into Onslaught a year later as a Goblin called Goblin Sharpshooter, although we added to its cost.

This was a cute card, but it had one small flaw: memory issues. Can you remember exactly how much damage has been dealt to your creatures at all times during every turn? It seems simple at first, but playing with the card is a lot harder than you might expect. It's even more complex when you're trying to figure out an attack because you must imagine every possible damage outcome.

This allowed you to get a 7/7 for , which was a big deal back then. The drawback is a little over the top, but I admire the boldness of the design.

The set, when it was handed off, had a big milling theme, so we made a creature that kept you from dying when you were unable to draw a card. We toyed with adding "You may decline to draw cards" to "Unlearned Mob," but when the majority of the milling cards left the set, this was also pulled.

In general, you want to make cards that encourage interaction. This is another way you can tell how old these cards are. We were much more cavalier back then about land destruction.

This card didn't make it into Odyssey, but it's an idea we would eventually print. Ghoultree from Dark Ascension and Nemesis of Mortals from Theros are mono-green creatures with this ability.

Some of the cards that didn't make it into Odyssey found a home later in the block. This card would become Exoskeletal Armor in Judgment, though with slightly different templating, an extra in its cost, and a new name. I'm pretty sure "Lhurgoyf Armor" wasn't an attempt at a real name.

Here was our attempt at doing a Regrowth with flashback. The biggest challenge with a repeatable Regrowth effect is that it could get repetitive if you return the same card repeatedly. This design tried to fix that by only allowing you to get one card of a certain type as it exiles all the other cards of that type. In the end, the spell wasn't worth the hassle, but I enjoy when we try to make things like this work.

In the printed set, Odyssey had only one artifact with threshold (Otarian Juggernaut), but we designed some others. "Giant Peashooter" is interesting in that getting to threshold doesn't change the effect, but it changes what you can target. The normal card can deal damage to players, but eventually you deal damage to creatures. This card was cut for not playing well enough, but I like to see us experimenting with how to use threshold.

This was another threshold artifact we tried. This is back in the day when we made a lot more two-mana artifacts that tapped for mana. The biggest problem with this card was that the bonus you get for reaching threshold isn't particularly interesting by the time you get to threshold. In the mid- to late game, you usually don't care if you have access to mana of any color.

I'm not sure what this design is doing here. I do like the idea of a music box with dancing mechanical gnomes. We seemed really scared of making it too easy to get a bunch of 1/1 creature tokens.

There seems to be a lot of cards that shut down activated abilities in this handoff document. I do appreciate our continuing theme that magical orbs are disruptive.

This card was a second way to keep from getting milled out. I find this one a bit more novel. If you can empty your graveyard, there are some shenanigans you can do with this one. I'm pretty sure I made this card as I was a huge fan of Soldevi Digger from Alliances, and I believe that influenced this design.

Here's a mana-reducing ability for activated abilities from your graveyard. I don't think it needs to also hose your opponent.

In Tempest, I made a card called Intuition.

The first time Intuition was ever played against me in a playtest, my opponent got three copies of the same card. I said that wasn't the intent of the card; they were supposed to get three different cards. But my opponent thought it was cool that they could get the same card and argued we should keep it as written and not as the design intended. The Design team had a big discussion about it, and we kept the card as it was written. "Dusty Tome" was my attempt to recapture what I originally intended. We didn't end up printing it, but I would get to make the card I originally wanted when we printed Gifts Ungiven in Champions of Kamigawa.

Here's another Regrowth variant. I liked the idea that you got a bunch of cards but were forced to have some variety in your choices.

In Arabian Nights, Richard Garfield made a card called City of Brass.

It was a land that allowed you to tap for mana of any color, but it dealt you 1 damage whenever it was tapped. I liked the idea that you had to pay life for the card's ability, but I also felt that constantly tracking life loss was a pain. My idea here was to have a single upfront life payment, then you could tap the land for mana of a chosen color. While this land didn't make it into the file, the idea of an upfront life payment stayed with me. When I designed the shock lands in Ravnica: City of Guilds, I used this design, though by then I realized it was cleaner to have a life payment rather than have the card deal damage.

This land tried to use the graveyard as a resource to help you get extra mana. The card had two issues. One, it generated too much mana too quickly, and two, it created tension with the threshold theme of the set, which we wanted to avoid doing.

Here's another land that's playing around in scry space years before that mechanic existed. While Aaron Forsythe made scry while designing Fifth Dawn, I doubt he was aware of this design.

Years later, we printed lands that use this kind of mechanic, including Haunted Fengraf from Dark Ascension, Memorial to Folly from Dominaria, and Mudflat Village from Bloomburrow. However, the versions we've printed have never been repeatable. They've always required you to sacrifice the land with the ability.

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Grave Measures

It took four articles, but we're finally finished. I hope you enjoyed this peek at Odyssey's design handoff. It was fun looking back at work I did nearly three decades ago. As always, I'm eager for any feedback on today's article, any of the cards I talked about, or on the set of Odyssey. You can email me or contact me through social media (Bluesky, Tumblr, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter).

Join us next week when we hear from the color Red in another installment of "My Words."

Until then, may you have fun looking back at things you did long ago.