Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1339: Journey into Nyx

Episode Date: May 15, 2026

This episode is another in my series to talk about every Magic set release. Today, I discuss the third set in the original Theros block, Journey into Nyx.

I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time to other drive to work. Okay, so today is another in my series to try to talk about every expansion. So today I'm going to talk about the third expansion in the Theros block, Journey into Nix. So, a bunch of things. So first and foremost, so Journey to Nix is a small set, 165 cards. 60 common, 60 uncommon, 35 rarers, 10 mythic rairs.

Came out May 2nd, 2014. It was codenamed countrymen because Friends, Ferris block was Friends, Romans, and Countrymen. Now, by the way, we always pick the code names before we even know what the sets are. So interestingly, Friends, Romans, and Countrymen is, I mean, it's attributed to a Roman, I guess, but anyway, it is definitely more adjacent to what the set is than the average codename is.

Not on purpose. Also, I think countrymen might be the only codename ever with a gendered name. I think a little trivia there. Okay, so this was the very first lead design by Ethan Fleischer. So, Ethan Fleischer was the winner of the second great designer search. He had served on a bunch of teams, but this was the first, the first, the first, first time he led a set. He's now led many, many sets, but this was his first set. So the design team led by Ethan was Dan Emmons, Eric Lauer, Matt Taback, who is still at Wizards,

as an editor, and myself. And the development was led by Dave Humphreys, who also still at Wizards. Ian Duke also at Wizards. Tom Jenka, who does booster fun, Eric Lauer and Ken Nagel. And the art director was Jeremy Jarvis. So, okay, so let me, once again, I did a Born of the Gods podcast where I sort of talked about Thera. So I'll just do a quick version of that since you can listen to the board. If you want a longer version, you can listen to the board of the gods podcast. Basically, we decide we're doing Greek mythology. It was the idea that we talked about forever, like a Greek mythology-inspired world.

We finally do it. We decide to have an enchantment theme, and we use the enchantments to represent the touch of the gods. So the gods themselves are all enchantment creatures, enchantments, and there's a lot of enchantment creatures in the set that are all creations of the gods. The idea being, in order to do a set about enchantments, to get the as fan up so that it mechanically works,

you need to have some enchantment creatures. The other thing we also did in the block is we just did a lot more with enchantments, like normally where we might do other card types. For example, we'll get to today when I get to the card section. There's a bunch of enchantments

that have flash on it. And the reason for that is that they allow it to sort of kind of act like a surprise and have a spell-like effect even though they linger because they're an enchantment. But anyway, we definitely did a little bit more with enchantments than we normally do. We had enchanting creatures.

We had the stone mechanic, which I'll get to in a second. Okay, so So interestingly, one of the challenges of doing blocks, of three set blocks, was that they would kind of peter out by the end. That we'd introduce a new block. People would be very excited. And then we do an expansion.

People would be excited, but not as excited as they were for the first one. And usually by the third, they're like, already. Can we move on, please? And so we were constantly trying to find ways to improve the third block. The third set in a block. So I tried something this time, which was the set, we knew enchantments were going to be a theme, but I decided what if we withheld enchantment matters for the third set? What if we made a set with lots and lots of enchantments, but waited to the final set

to give you the pieces to play on the enchantments sort of together? I mean, there are other themes, obviously, you could play out of the first two sets. But sort of, what if we sort of took this component piece that, We could have front-loaded, but we're like, well, what if we hold it back a little bit and blow it out in the third set? Kind of like what we did with Apocalypse. We held back on the enemy card. So I'm like, what if we took Enchantment Matters? I mean, obviously you're going to have a theme with Enchantments, which we did, but hold off an enchantment matters where you just want to play a lot of enchantments in the same deck.

Hold that off. And so we did. We held that off to the third set, which helped the third set a little bit. I think when I talked about Born of the Gods, I think in some ways this plan just made Born of the Gods kind of the third set. and Journey Nix is kind of the second set. So it's one of the few times where the second and third set act a little bit differently in relation to each other than in other sets.

But anyway, so one of the main mechanics was Constellation. So Constellation, so in Journey Nix, I believe all cards with Constellation themselves were enchantments. And so they said whenever I or another enchantment enters the battlefield, something effect. In design, we called it an enchantment fall, model left or landfall. One of the things we've learned over the years

is that we did landfall in original Zendikar and like, oh, it's kind of fun to reward you for doing things you want to do. And so we did experiment with a whole bunch of different things. I think we had in Champlainfall like day one. We're like, oh, but maybe we can do better. And we try it all in the end.

We're like, nah, Chapman's fall is pretty good. So we stay with constellation. The other new mechanic was a mechanic called Strive. Strive is a mechanic where it goes on I think mostly instances and sorceries. And the idea is

you can spend extra mana. There's a strive cost. For each time you spend the strive cost, you can add another target to the spell. So the idea is there are spells that you get one free target, but you can pay to get extra targets, is the idea.

So it's kind of a kickerish spell, but what you're getting is extra targets. And I'll have a sample a little later today. We also brought back a bunch of mechanics from earlier on the block. So the theme of the block

when I handed it off was gods, heroes, and monsters. So for gods, we had devotion, which was a redone version of a mechanic called Chroma that originally showed up in Even Time. Well, originally showed up sort of in FutureSit, Future Shift Sheet.

But then it showed up with a name in Even Tide. Chroma was one of those things that we... I really believed... Like, I had high hopes for Chroma, and it didn't quite do what I hoped. Devotion was us reworking, cleaning it up a little bit, making a little more flavorful

and a little more focused. And that was enough to... Devotion really took off. It became very popular. And then, also we had bestow. Bestow was... They were enchanting creatures

that you could pay a certain bestow cost, and if you did, they became an aura instead of a creature. But when the enchanted creature died, it fell off and became a creature. So normally the bestow cost was a little bit more than the mana cost. So the idea essentially is you can just, quote, one of the big problems with oras in general is if you draw an aura and don't draw a creature, it's dead in your hand.

But the idea of bestow is you can always play it as the creature. So if I get two bestow cards, I can play the creature and then bestow the second one. Okay. Heroes! So Heroic was our main mechanic for heroes. Heroics said, whenever I'm the target of a spell, it's a trigger and I do something. And that went on the different heroes. And different colors had different effects.

I know green, like it was plus one plus one counters. And then for monsters, we did a mechanic called monstrosity. Basically, the idea is it's a one-time payment. When you pay it, you can put plus one plus one counters on it. It's usually monstrosity N, I believe. You put that many plus one plus encounters on it. And then also, usually within a monstrous, they can gain other abilities when they become monstrous.

And the idea is this is, and monstrous was kind of the first time, when Shrosity was the first time we did this, where it's kind of a one-time, once per game upgrade. We would come back, exhaust, and there's other things we would do later, but this is us first playing in the space. As I mentioned in my Born of the Gods podcast,

one of the themes in Theros was evolution and adventure and growing. that the gods got more powerful, and the heroes got more powerful, and the monsters got more powerful. Now, the interesting thing about monstrosity is it was in Theros when we were figuring out what to put into Born of the Gods because we were adding two new mechanics,

inspired in tribute. Inspired, by the way, did also... Inspired was both in Born of the Gods and also was... There was some inspired cards in Journey Nix. We decided to cut back a mechanic just to make room for things. and we cut monstrosity.

Interestingly, we decided after the fact, like we cut it for Born of the Gods and we started doing Journey to the Nix were like, should we have done that? Was that right? And for the only time ever in blocks that I can remember, like we stopped using something, realized that we were mistaken,

and then started using it again. So Monstrosity shows up in the first set, Theros, and the third set Journey to Nix, but not the second set Born of the Gods. Also, Skry, Skirai wasn't evergreen at the time. Scrii first showed up in Fifth Dawn. It had come back in a corset, I believe.

But anyway, Scrib was such a perfect fit because the Greeks have omens and prophecies and stuff. So it was a very good fit. Anyway, those were the... Oh, we did do something different with Misto, I should mention. So there were five bestow cards, but all the Mastod cards in June and Nix had a positive and a negative ability.

So I boost you, but I can't block, are things in which it's not clear whether you want to put it on your creature or maybe you want to put it on your opponent's creature. Most of the other bestow cards in the block really are positive. You don't really want to put them on your opponent's creatures, but these are a double-edged

swords. Sometimes you will. For example, on Camp Block, maybe I need an attack for the win, and if I put Camp Block in your creature, it doesn't matter I'm making it more powerful because I just got to get through. Okay, so, One of the things that went on in the block was the main character of the story was Elspeth.

For those that don't know Elspeth. I mean, hopefully you do. She's been around quite a while. Elspeth is a knight. Her core character trait is she wants to do right. She feels compelled to do the right thing. And she sort of has this history of showing up places and seeing wrongs and then feeling compelled to right the wrongs. She felt a lot.

We were trying to do, like whenever we go to. a world inspired by a certain genre here in Greek mythology. We wanted to get characters to sort of match that. She felt a lot like a Greek hero. So Ellsbeth shows up. I think she slays a hydra. She gets attention of Heliod,

and Heliod sends her on a quest. And the quest basically is Heliod doesn't like that Xenegos has ascended to godhood. Because that is, it's, you know, not the proper way. And so through a series of events, Ellsbeth ends up killing Xenegos

in Nix. because it's a journey into Nix. Nix is kind of this connected... I don't even know how to drive it, like godly plane. But anyway, she kills them in Nix. Then she returns back to Theros. And then Heliod,

because she killed a god, kills Elspeth. Now, one of the things we are aware of is there's an underworld. The Greek mythology, obviously, iconically, has an underworld. And we knew that killing Elspeth here

didn't really kill her. It put her in the underworld. And then we knew that someday we'd come back and we'd get her out of the underworld, which we did. The Earth's Beyond Death. She escapes. She was an important part of a later storyline with the Frexian. So we knew we were going to come back. But it was, for the people that were unaware of that, you know, Elspeth was a very beloved character.

Now, we did kind of hint, like, that she's, you know, she's on a place that has an underworld. But anyway, that was the story. Okay, so let's get into the cards. So, I'll start to remember. First up, is Manaccom. It's a land. Tap, pay one life, and then you get to add one manna of any color. So this basically is a fixed city of brass. So city of brass was created by Richard Garfield in the very first ever magic expansion, Arabian Nights. But the way it works is you tapped it.

It dealt one damage to you when tapped, and then you got one man of any color. Just the cleaner version of it, instead of it doing damage, is just you pay life when you you do it. So this is just a cleaned up version of that. One of the quirky things, well, it's just interesting that there's a lot, I mean, as we advance and get new templating technology, sometimes things that are a little clunky become cleaner. And this is an example of just us making a cleaner template. Okay, next, temple of epiphany and temple, temple of malady. So there were a cycle of 10 dual ends that entered tapped and scry one. I guess five of them must have been in the first set. Three were in the second set.

So two were in this set. This set has the blue, red, and the black green one, I guess. But anyways, the idea is that there are some cycles that we spread across all the things. I will get to another cycle in a second. Idleana blossoms. So two green-green. It's an enchantment creature, a spirit, two-two, and the constellation is whenever this or any other enchantment you control enters the battlefield, you draw a card. So there's many things you can do

whenever we have an input. A popular output usually is drawing a card. Drawing your card is very powerful. So this was designed as the most powerful constellation. In fact, it was the most powerful constellation, and of all the constellations, he's the most play. It's kind of like the Dern Enchantress. Dernanchantress was in Alpha

that whenever you played an enchantment drew your card. So this is like that. Slightly different. It itself is an enchantment creature. So, I mean, when you play your second one, it does trigger the first one, stuff like that. Very, very popular card. Okay, next.

Dictate of Aribis. Arabis is the mono-black god. He rules the underworld. Three black, black, enchantment, flash. Whenever a creature you control dies, an opponent sacks a creature.

So one of the themes we have in this set is enchantments that have flash on them, meaning that they're enchantments, their global effects, but they do something that might be beneficial, especially if your opponent's not ready for it happening. For example, maybe my opponent isn't going to block my, block and kill my creature if they're aware they'll lose one of their creatures. But I can flash this in as a surprise. One of the things we liked about the flash enchantments is they filled a little bit of a rub, but the set does have incidents and sorceries,

but it feels a little bit of a role. It's a little more like an instant, even though technically it's enchantment, and thus triggers constellation and things like that. Next, Twin Flame, one are sorcery. So this is our strive card, or a strive card. So it strives for two and a red. So what you do is you copy any number of creatures,

and you create a token copy of it. It gains haste, and then at end of turn, you get rid of it. and the idea is for one in a red I already cause this heat shimmering I can heat shimmer one creature right I can temporarily copy a creature make a token and for that turn and it got haste I can use that creature but I only get it for one

turn and then for every two red you spend your two in a red you spend beyond the first one in a red you can pick another creature so the idea with enough mana you can copy a whole bunch of things for the turn and that's the idea of strive essentially

there are things that get more useful as you have more mana just because you can start affecting more things. Okay, next, Eroes, God of Victory, two red-white, legendary enchantment creature, God, 7-4. He's indestructible. He is not a creature unless you have devotion 7 to red and white, his devotion colors. And then he says, creatures you control have menace,

and he prevents all damage to attacking creatures you control. So red, white, and black, red are twin, twin gods. Oh, so once again, we did a 15-card cycle of gods, five monocolor gods, and then 10, two-collar gods. The five monocolor god showed up in Theros. The five ally-colored gods showed up in Born of the Gods, and the five enemy ones show up in Journey into Nix. They all work the same. All 15 of them work the same. all indestructible. You need a certain devotion threshold. Seven for the multicolor. I think it might

be seven for the monocolor. But that might be different. And then they all have, they're an enchantment creature. So they all have an enchantment ability, a static ability that does something. So you have to get enough things in play to sort of turn into a creature. So usually they're cheap enough that you get it early, but you don't get the creature right away. But you do get the enchantment effect right away. And this card gives you, this card, so the twins, the red white and black red, are all about war and fighting. And so they play into different aspects of it. Red White's a little more of the honorable side of it,

and black red is a little less honorable. But they both sort of do their thing. And so the idea is the abilities that Eros Grants you are really good in an aggressive attacking deck because he's the god of war, one of the gods of war. Okay, next, Nick's Weaver, one black reen, enchantment creature, spider, two, three. He's got reach.

In the beginning of upkeep, you mill two cards from your library. And then for one black and green, you can exile the card. So it's like sacrifice except it's exiled rather than go to the graveyard. And if you do that, you can regrow slash bring back any card from your graveyard to your hand. So the idea is he slowly fills up your graveyard. And then when you're ready for it, you can go get the card you need. Okay, next, Doom Wave Giant, Four and a Black, Enchantment Creature Giant, 4-6. He is a constellation that says

Whenever he or another enchantment enters the battlefield All your opponent's creatures get minus one, minus one until end of turn. And so the idea is if you can chain a couple enchantments in one turn, you might be able to kill things And the more things you can, more enchantments you play, the more things you can kill in any one turn. Okay, next, Dictative Crufix,

one blue-blue enchantment, flash. At the beginning of each player's upkeep, they draw in addition, if each player's draw step, they draw an additional card. So this is kind of like howling mine from Alpha, except it's a blue enchantment, and the reason that it is Flash is

you want to draw a card before your opponent draws a card. Normally, if I just play this on my turn, my opponent would have a draw step before I have a draw step because my drop step's before my main phase. But because I have Flash, well, A, I could play it either on my turn before my draw step,

or I could play it on my opponent's turn after their draw step, But anyway, Flash allows me to play it in such a way that I get to draw first. Next, Trident Shorestocker. It's a blue manor for a one-one creature. It's a Murfolk rogue, unblockable. My guess is the reason this sees play is it's a Murphoke. It's a one-drop unblockable Murfolk.

And we've made other one-block undropable creatures, but this one's a Murphoke. So your Mofoke deck likes it. Scourge of Fleets, Five Blue-Blue Creature Cracken, 6-6. When it enters, you get to bounce all the opponent's creatures with a toughness of X or less, where X is the number of islands you control. So the later in the game, you go, and the more mono-blue focused you are, the more things you can bounce. Because of a devotion to blue, there's a bunch of really good devotion to blue cards. There was a mono-blue deck at the time, and so I'm not sure whether this card... It's probably played it because this is really good in a

mono-blue deck. I mean, it's seven-man, so maybe in certain constructive formats it's two slow. Okay, next. Oh, before I move on. So this is a cracking. A little funny story. So when we first started making Theros, we knew we wanted sea serpents. Sea serpents are a pretty big part. I mean, in Greek mythology, sea serpents definitely show up. But there's a movie, what's the name of the movie? What's the name of the movie? See if it were coming to me. There's a famous movie, a Greek mythology movie. Why am I blinking in the movie? But anyway, in the movie, there's a line, Release the Cracken.

Now, Crackin technically actually come from, like, Scandinavian mythology. The word Cracken is not a Greek mythology thing. And so we went through this thing of, should we call this a Cracken? And, like, oh, it's, you know, the movie kind of made people think about it and release the Cracken is fun. And it is a sea serpent.

I mean, Crackens are sea serpents. and we finally decided it was just flavorful and it was fun. People would enjoy being called the Cracken. And once again, we're influenced by Greek mythology. We're not doing one-for-one Greek mythology. It's our world in Philippa Greek mythology, and we felt a Cracken was acceptable.

There are people who informed us that we should not have a Cracken, but, I mean, we walked into aware that we were borrowing from a nearby culture that wasn't from the Greek culture. But once again, the concept is there. Things that are like crackens are there. They just weren't called crackens.

Okay, next, Dictate of the Twin Gods. Three red reds, so five men a total, two of which is red. It's an enchantment with Flash. That's what we do in red all that often. I think this was a cycle. And it doubles all damage. In fact, I made the very first damage doubler in Tempest. It was called Furnace of Wrath.

And it doubled all damage, because I love doubling things to people that don't know that. So this was just an extension of that. The nice thing about Flash is I can flash right before I'm attacking or something, so that the first doubling of damage is my doubling of damage, not my opponent's doubling of damage. Okay, next. Banishing Light.

You guys might know this one. Two white enchantment. Exiled target non-land permanent. And it stays exiled until this permanent leaves the battlefield. This is where banishing light first appeared. I think we had oblivion ring before this. And this was kind of a cleaned-up oblivion ring that was a little cleaner. And I think this has the technology.

of exiles until, I think it's the first time we used that, I think. But anyway, this has become a staple card. We use this all the time. Anyway, it's just, it's very, very good white removals, especially for limited. We like it, so we do it a lot. Next is Athrios. Athrios, God of passage. One white black, a legendary enchantment creature, God, 5-4.

Obviously indestructible and not a creature unless you have devotion to black or white of seven or greater. when a creature you control dies, you return it to your hand unless your opponent pays three life. So this represents when you die, there's a river you have to cross to go to the land of the dead. Once again, it's inspired by Greek mythology.

And this is the person who carries you across. I think Greek mythology is not a god. But we made him a god here, because we tweak things up a little bit. Okay, next. Grim Guardian, two in a black for an enchantment creature zombie, One four.

Consolation is each opponent loses one life. So this is another win condition for an enchantment deck. Get this out and just start casting lots of enchantments, and it'll win you the game if you do enough of them. Next, Idle on a rhetoric. Two and a white. Enchantment Creature Spirit, one four. Each player cannot play more than one spell each turn.

So we had a spell. It was originally a blue enchantment. Then we made, the white enchantment is called Rule of Law. The Blue Enchantment was like a nurse of saga. Then we realized like a rule setting is more white thing. We made the rule of law. And this is just rule of law on a body. One of the things we like to do is white likes to do rule setting.

And it's fun. We call bears, which are cards that go on, usually small creatures, that have the global abilities that usually cause some problems for your opponent. In this particular one, it's, you know, it also affects you. But in theory, you built your deck to deal with it where your opponent did not. This is also the kind of thing you could sideboard in against certain decks, like a combo deck or something that really needs to cast multiple spells in a turn. Next, extinguish all hope for black, black sorcery.

Destroy all non-enchantment creatures. So this set has a lot of enchantment creatures. We like to do different mass-board, mass creature removal. And this one's nice in that, hey, if you build around it, you can have enchanted creatures. So you're destroying all their creatures that probably are enchanted creatures, and yours, which probably are enchantment creatures, survive. So obviously a powerful card.

Next, Hydra Broodmafter, 4-Green Green, this is a Hydra, a creature, 7-7, and it has an activation for X, X-Green, monstrosity X. So that means, let's say I spend five mana, so X is 2. So 2 plus 2 plus green, then I get metastity 2, so I get 2 plus 1-plus-1 counters. And then when you use... monstrous, you get to put X, X, X, X creatures onto the battlefield. I think there are a little mini-hidreys. So the idea is if I spend four, let's say, so X is two, I get to monstrousous plus two plus two, so it becomes a nine-nine. And then I get two-twos.

But if I spend more men, I give three, three-threes or four-fours. It grows along with however big it is. Crufix, God of the Horizons, three green and blue. obviously a legendary enchantment creature god. He's a 4-7. He's indestructible. He is not a creature unless you have a devotion to green and blue, devotion of seven to green and blue.

And you have no maximum hand size. And if you would lose unspent mana, it just turns colorless. So any of your colored mana sticks around, but turns colorless when it sticks around. Next, Master of the Feast. black black. It's an enchantment creature demon. It is a five-five. It is flying. But at the beginning of your upkeep, each opponent draws a card. So the idea here is a one, a five-five flying creature for one black-black is pretty good. So it has a downside. The downside is your opponent gets to

draw a card every turn, or all your opponents get an extra card every turn. Or it gets your extra card. On your upkeep, they get a draw card, but they get an extra extra card. Okay, the final card today is Nick's fleece ram. One in a white for an enchantment creature, sheep. 0.5. In the beginning of your upkeep, you gain

one life. One of the things you'll see is there's a lot of enchantments. We tried to do as much as we could with the enchantment creatures to give them something that feels enchantment-y. There are, I think we made some vanilla enchantment creatures that were tokens. So you can get some vanilla enchantment creatures,

but I think those are just tokens. I think if it's a card, we made sure that it has some sort of static global ability that it feels enchantmity. We wanted it to feel enchantment. So we made sure to do that. So they have a triggered ability

or a static ability, something in which it has that definitely feels sort of enchantment-like. That was important to us. But anyway, guys, I am now at work. And I talked all about Journey to Nix. you guys enjoyed the chat today.

But as I'm here, we all know what that means. It means this is the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. Hope you guys enjoyed today's podcast, and I'll see you next time.