Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #853: Odyssey with Randy Buehler

Episode Date: July 23, 2021

I sit down with former R&D member Randy Buehler to talk about the making of Odyssey.

I'm not pulling out of my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another Drive to Work, Coronavirus Edition. So I've been using my time at home to talk to people, past and present, about making magic sets. So today I have Randy Buehler, and we're going to talk about the making of the set Odyssey. Hey, Randy. Hello. So, this is way, Odyssey is long, long ago.

So, let's talk, so was Odyssey your first lead, I think? It was a little, it was my first big set lead. Okay. I had, I was like a co-lead on Plane Shift and I'm pretty sure I led Apocalypse. Okay. I got pretty quickly up into like the dev team. Like I was representing the dev team

after the rest of Wizards for the Invasion block. So first big set lead. Okay. So what is your earliest memory of Odyssey? the death team out to the rest of wizards for the invasion block so first big set lead okay so what is your earliest memory of odyssey uh i mean for me it's a graveyard set that was the pitch right i honestly it's you and i remember you i don't know if we had this conversation at the pro tour where you got the inspiration i think we actually did did. My first memory of Odyssey is you in a feature match area at a Pro Tour watching a player pick up their graveyard

and thumb through it. And then the way you're pitching the set to me is very much, what if there was a card in there that mattered? What if there was a spell they could cast out of the graveyard? And it was it was you pitching flashback that's my first memory okay um yeah one of the things is interesting is the the year before was invasion block and invasion was the first block that kind of had a theme to it before that it wasn't so thematic and it kind of started the themes and so the first

year was multicolor made sense and sense. And so I love graveyard. I love graveyard themes. I always have a graveyard themes. And so, yeah, I pitched a graveyard theme. I got whoever, Bill or whoever had to sign off on it. And yeah, and then I think what happened was I came in with an idea for Flashback and then Threshold came from Richard.

Okay. Yeah, I mean, those are obviously the two big keywords that sort of gave the set that graveyard identity. I didn't specifically remember that threshold was his, but that makes sense. Yeah, oh no, threshold was definitely Richard. I think Richard loved the idea that the game

state would change with time, and that there was something that would make it happen, and he came up with the idea which makes a lot of sense is graveyard is a great marker of time that you have some control over so yeah and then i wasn't on the design team right i was the developer that you guys were handing it to uh i remember i think it was when it came in from design the threshold for threshold was 10 right not seven and it was, I don't remember exactly when this changed, but I definitely remember

there was a version of threshold that was sort of bigger effects, but took longer to get to, right? And 10 was your target instead of 7. I think if I remember correctly, originally we had tried multiple thresholds. Oh, okay. And then it was like,

it was just too much. You know what I'm saying? That's chaos. Right. And so I think we had tried a couple of different ones, And then it was just too much. You know what I'm saying? That's chaos. Right. And so I think we had tried a couple different ones. And then we decided it was crazy to have more than one. And we might have turned in 10.

But I think we played like, it was something like 7 and 10 and 13 or something. And then we consolidated. And then, right, I think we decided that the 7, you and the developers decided the 7 was cleaner than the 10. Yeah, well, right. So that makes sense that in design, I don't think I ever played a version where there were multiple threshold numbers working around it. You guys must have tried that and rejected it during the design process. And I do think it came to me at 10. And a lot of the reason we went from 10 to 7 was we wanted it to be relevant to limited, right? from 10 to 7 was we wanted it to be relevant to limited, right?

Rather than being this hard-to-accomplish, big, splashy thing, it felt like if it's going to be a graveyard matter set, you know what? The limited gameplay needs to revolve around the graveyard too. And so we wanted threshold to be a thing that we could put, that we could have matter on a bunch of commons. And we just needed the number to be smaller in order to have it be achievable. And it didn't mean we had to tone down some of the rewards,

but it did set up such that you weren't going to get there every game in Limited, but it was going to be half the time, 40% of the time. If you worked for it and drafted your deck around it, you were going to get there. It was kind of where we wanted it to be. Yeah, Threshold was definitely something that took... It's one of those ideas that's a really cool idea that

a lot of people don't realize this. When you do something you've never done before that there's no precursor to look at, there's no precedent to sort of wait against, it's really, really hard because you're like, I have no idea how this works. And Threshold was a lot like that.

And this is still a point where we're not even going to know how block themes work. Yeah. Multicolor sort of designs itself. You get to do big, cool, splashy things, but you don't have to put words on the text box to do it. So this was

pretty innovative. In a lot of ways, it was blazing new territory, I thought. So let's talk a little bit about Fleshback. Sure. So, I mean, basically the idea I had was spells you could cast twice. So

we'd had Buyback in Tempest, and that was sort of spells you could keep recasting. And obviously Buyback has some issues. And so people really like buyback, and so I think flashback... It's interesting you mentioned the Pro Tour, because I think the origin of flashback, in my mind, was I was the head judge of the feature match area,

and so I would watch people play feature matches all the time. And sometimes I'd be watching a match where it was just lopsided, where it was like one person was clearly winning. And to entertain myself, I would think of things like handicaps I could give to one player, you know. And so I would like, if this were true, what could the other player do? I would just start to entertain myself. And one of my favorites was,

well, what if one player, the guy behind, could cast stuff out of his graveyard? How would that change things? And that really inspired me, because buyback was so popular. Players clearly like casting spells more than once. And so the idea was, okay, well, what if you could cast them twice?

Once from your hand and once from your graveyard. Which solves the real problem with buyback, being that you just get these repeated game states yes the game kind of stagnates where one person is just doing the same thing over and over again the other person doesn't have a way to get out from under it so yeah it does solve that elegantly while still giving you that that feeling of being able to do the thing multiple times so yeah it's good mechanic what is your memory of grappling because i mean one of the once again it's something we hadn't done before so like i think flashback costs are a lot more expensive than you think they'd be from like that was our memory of us we kept making more expensive

yeah i mean it was tricky um like you said it's a thing that hadn't really been done before so how are you gonna do it i i was reasonably flashback felt like it landed in a decent place. I don't know. I mean, it's going to have to be, I mean, I think cycling and flashback are maybe kicker. I mean, the three mechanics that we've done the most times that just keep coming back.

Those are sort of the trifecta of just like early mechanics that just nailed it and just, of course, we'll keep doing them. Right. Yeah, my issue, you asked me about the costing of things. My regrets are all around the Psychotog. And in particular, the thing that bugs me about Psychotog is how much it overshadowed Shadow Mage Infiltrator, Finkle's Invitational card.

Well, let's talk real quickly, because this is a funny story. So, one of the things that happened was, I handed over a Graveyard set to you, and you asked me for a couple things, one of which was, you asked me for a cycle of A-Togs. Do you remember this? It makes sense. I don't have

a specific memory of it, but I mean, Lurgoyf is a Graveyard Matters card that had a lot of love at the time, so why wouldn't you expand on... Sorry, Lurgoyf is a Graveyard Matters card that had a lot of love at the time, so why wouldn't you expand on, sorry, the Lurgoyf, not the Aetogs. I asked for the Aetogs because it was ways to sac stuff to get stuff into the Graveyard. Right, so what happened was I had made a

Lurgoyf cycle, that was already in the set, and you had asked for an Aetog cycle. You wanted a multicolor, I'm trying to remember why you wanted it. You wanted a two-color Aet't remember why you wanted it you wanted a two-color a-tog cycle but we decided to splash multi-color right we decided yeah we wanted just a light touch we didn't want to be a multi-color set but we didn't want to go from invasion down to zero uh in particular you know some of that was probably early thinking about uh constructed right

we're still learning how to have blocks that would play well and constructed where sort of themes could go from block to block so we didn't want to cut the multicolored spigot down to zero and atogs set up where i mean whatever it's a cool thing that people liked but it's also a way to put stuff in the graveyard so it doesn't say it's a graveyard matters mechanic but it actually kind of is i think that was my logic yes and i remember you you asked me and then i came back i i liked the idea that the way that multicolor worked is they had two abilities, essentially, and then they were made so they'd be interconnected. So it allowed you to do things.

Obviously, blue and black were probably the most synergistic when the dust settled. Yeah. I mean, on the one hand, I don't think there's anything wrong with the design. The flaws of Psychotag are on the development side, not the design side. Some of that, I think i think is torment's fault like i don't remember thinking a lot about madness when we were doing odyssey like i don't have specific memories about you know how much we knew about what was coming in torment in terms of madness but like the thing that pushed psychotaga over the top i mean i think it's probably a little too aggressive even without madness but like once that discard card ability can trigger madness spells now you're suddenly in best deck in

constructive way so so madness uh was in the next set um yeah and at the time we were in the very early blocks like block planning back then so it So we didn't know madness was coming. Like when we were making, I mean, clearly before Odyssey finished, the next set had started, Torment had started. So you didn't know madness was coming. I don't know if I did.

Like it was probably in a design file at the time when I'm developing Odyssey. But yeah, block planning isn't a word we talked a lot about, right? We were just sort of working out the mechanics of block themes at all. Like, oh, let's make graveyard matters. And so for me, Odyssey specifically was very much how do we make graveyard matter?

And a lot of it was around that experience. Not so much, I mean, it's probably not even fair to blame madness for Psychotog. But whatever, that's like my biggest regret. And it isn't even Psychotalk so much as like i said the fact that here's this one blue black uncommon like that's like part of how you know we weren't we didn't think it was the best card in the set it's freaking uncommon there's a one blue black rare in the same sense and it's got john finkel's face on it and yeah i think Shadow Mage Infiltrator

would have been relevant to that constructed if it wasn't just totally pushed out by the fact that Psychotron was better. Oh, just because of the Atog story. The other funniest thing about Atog was I had made a Togatog for Unglue 2 and Unglue 2 got shelved and never

made, but I had the art. We commissioned the art for it. So I came to you and said, can we put a dog in the set? I have the art. We already have the art. And so you said yes. Yeah, no, that was great.

Okay, so one other request. This is a quirky, fun request. Something else I put in the set at your request. Do you remember the dog cycle? I mean, Wild Mongrels, obviously. Yeah, Wild Mongrels is the green one. Wild Mongrels is the best of them. Yeah, there were not very many dogs in Magic before that, right? Yes,

there were not. And you asked me to make a cycle of dogs, which I did. So there's a dog in every color. Wild Mongrel being the real good one, the one that people remember. Yeah. Do you remember why? I mean, I know that I don't have a specific memory of that request. No, it's been a while.

I do know that, like, in my Magic past, Eric Lauer, who is not at Wizards at this point in time, right? Yeah, not there yet. is not at Wizards at this point in time, right? Yeah, not there yet. A teammate of mine when I was playing professionally, you know, in the late 90s, so, you know, a couple years back, just randomly loved dogs and would randomly point at dog carts.

And I don't know, was I, was it an actual connection to Eric? Yes. You asked me for Eric to make a cycle of dogs, and I did. So, yeah, no, I, it's funny, I still have a deck box like the the like 800 count white collector box that you carry decks around to events and you know we play test i have one

where it's just like every dog that had been printed before 1999 was just like in sleeves and taped to it and i was like these are the deck eric was carrying around and messing with while we were playtesting. The man liked dogs. So that's cool. Okay, so let's talk. So one of the things about Odyssey was, like when I'm introspective and I look back as a designer, one of the things that drove me was,

and I don't think this necessarily was a good impulse, but it drove me, was I really liked the idea of taking some known, accepted thing of magic and turning it on its ear. And Odyssey really started for me messing with card advantage. Sure.

So, do you want to talk, I'm curious a little bit about, like, developing, like, it's a very quirky set, like, the Odyssey's really spiky, it's one of the more spiky blocks we've ever made, in that it was very much about resource management, and, the Odyssey is really spiky. It's one of the more spiky blocks we've ever made in that it was very much about resource management and, you know,

it is things that spikes tend to really enjoy. I'm sort of curious, from your standpoint of making it, how much of that, how spiky were we trying to make it? I think we were trying to make it Graveyard Matters. And then I do think that, like, we took Threshold into a spikier place when we decided we wanted to make it graveyard matters and then i do think that like we took

threshold into a spikier place when we decided we wanted to make it matter for limited and so like i look back on the set i do think it's a little spiky i feel like it's not the splashiest set we did um and so like there's a large swath of the audience that wasn't turned on by it but there's a chunk of the audience you know a sizable chunk i don't know if it's a majority of it but a sizable chunk that just loved it right because you got to you know eke out incremental advantage and figure out oh you know i'm going to lose card advantage but i'm going to get this card to the graveyard and that's going to turn on threshold and make all these other cards exciting and you know oh and i've got this flashback thing so it i mean that element being there in design certainly carried through.

I wasn't trying to develop it explicitly as a spiky set. I was trying to develop it as a Graveyard Matters set. But I think that to make the Graveyard Matters is kind of inherently spiky. Yeah, so for example, there's a card called Patrol Hound. One and a white for 2-2. And you can discard a card from your hand, doesn't require any mana, and it gains first strike until end of turn.

And, like, that card is really interesting in that it was a really powerful card, and you didn't care about the first strike most of the time. Like, that's extremely authentic, it gave it first strike. It just was this way for no mana to get cards from your hand to the graveyard. Yeah, yeah, no, I totally agree.

I mean, like you say, you take a thing that people think they understand and turn it on its head. I'm going to throw card advantage away because the game's going to give me this other thing that's actually more important than card advantage. It definitely accomplished that thing you set out to do. Yeah, and like I said, I've since learned, you know, over the years that the reason to sort of upend

the Apple cart is not just to upend the Apple cart. Like, that's not a great reason to design something. That is okay if you... Like, I don't mind going outside the box if it serves some larger purpose, but I always felt like I kind of went outside the box to go outside the box, like, just to prove that

I could make something that, I don't know. Part of me really admires the craftsmanship of Odyssey, but I always wonder if I, like, was I making something I wasn't supposed to make? I don't know. Yeah, no, I understand that completely. It feels like, from a development side,

it was like, okay, well, this is the design intent. Now let's make the best version of this that we can. And we wound up with a thing that's somewhat polarizing in terms of who it appealed to, right? Wasn't the most popular set. It was probably less popular than the block before or the block after. So does that mean we messed up? Or does that mean, well, we wanted to do graveyard. We were going to do graveyard matters at some point.

And, you know, it was going to look something like this. I don't know. I mean, if we had this to do over again, I guess we could have found a splashier way to do it that was maybe a little bit less fiddly. I mean, the one thing I will say is if you're the kind of player that enjoys the resource management stuff, it's insanely fun.

I get requests all the time from players like, can we do another Odyssey? If you enjoy it, it's really another odd scene? Cause it's, if you enjoy it, it's really, really fun. Um, but it's very, I don't know what the percentages are,

but like in my head, it's like a third of the audience loved the set. Do you do it? Do you, is that, is that enough? Like you can't make every set for everybody, but I don't know if a third of the audience loving the set is enough.

Well, I mean, it's interesting. If you look forward in magic, like I think something like Innistrad does a better job of giving audience loving the set is about well i mean it's interesting if you look forward in magic like i think something like innistrad does a better job of giving you a graveyard set while giving other things for other players so that like hey if i don't care about graveyard i make my zombie deck or whatever and then i'm happy and it thematically all ties together like agreed but

a lot of that is building on what we learned from Odyssey, right? Oh, yeah, I mean, the other thing is it's very easy to look at the Model T versus, you know, cars of today Why didn't they just make a Corvette? Yeah, I mean, on some level had I not learned this lesson in this set this was the set where I learned the lesson and, I mean, it's funny

I really like from a my Mel game designer sort of just like making things that all click together. There's a synergy to the set that's really a thing of beauty that I really enjoy. Yeah, no, I agree. I'm proud of the job the development side did of sort of giving life to this vision of what we could do in this space. We learned a lot from it. A chunk of the audience loved it.

It was probably too spiky or you know too many of the mechanics were spiky we didn't have enough for the people that didn't love the resource the weirdo card advantage resource manipulation stuff but it will it's interesting that doesn't like i said that doesn't make it wrong like at the time knowing what we knew and on the trajectory the game was on you know we're still working out what thematic blocks look like at some level we're still stabilizing the game from the chaos of the saga block too right that is like the power level of magic is swinging wildly in the late 90s you go from you know tempest which was arguably too fast although in retrospect it's probably the speed the game wound up at 20 years later but

then saga is combo broken recading masks is sort of bland and uninteresting to most of the audience so great invasion multicolor works now okay can we actually stabilize at that power level and that level of interest and uh you know set the game up to keep going for 20 years and you know in my head that sort of invasion honestly onslaught that run of three years uh i'm super proud of the way it did do that right the chaos of the 90s gets left behind we're not banning cards but we are printing interesting cards there's people are building cool decks and doing stuff and i just i enjoyed that room of magic and yeah it's yeah odyssey contributed to that goal is what i'm trying to say I talk about the ages of magic

and the first age is sort of alpha and then Mirage to me is the second age it introduces the concept of blocks and stuff and then Invasion is the third age because the idea of themes it's about something and yeah once again it's really important

when you look at the history of magic if we hadn't done Thing A, we wouldn't have built Thing B on top of it. You don't get to later without doing it before. And Odyssey is very... I probably learned more lessons from making Odyssey than any set. I think Odyssey was a very important learn-from-it sort of set.

And that's, to me, when I think of all the sets, Odyssey to me, when I think of it as being my kids, it's kind of like my problem kid that has some issues, but like, you know, how do I parent that a little differently next time, you know? My later kids get raised a little differently because I had that kid.

That's kind of how I think of Odyssey. I like that analogy. So is there anything, what are your favorite members of Odyssey. I like that analogy. So is there anything, what are your favorite members of Odyssey? Like, when you think about Odyssey, what comes to mind for you? I mean, I thought the Madness decks were in a really good spot for Constructed.

I mean, some of that is, like, my job being on the developer side was, a lot of it was can we get constructed magic to be you know like i said stable and interesting and i thought it's not just odyssey itself but more odyssey plus the rest of the block like when madness came in i did like those decks in constructed it's not in the wild mongrel brute wallah baskin brute wallah versions of it were super cool and it it was like this viable, standard constructed deck that was accessible to new players,

that sort of had a beat down to it, but then you had controlled decks. Eh, maybe the controlled decks were too good. It's funny, like for me, Odyssey is... I mean, my memories of Magic and the things I look at it's hard to single out odyssey specifically so much as like there's this trajectory that goes through those those three years right invasion odyssey onslaught of let's make the big creatures bigger let's make the answer cards worse let's try to pare down blue like we got rid of counterspell we got rid of source

deplash shares we started putting in giant creatures, you know, the rifts and spirit mongers of the world. And so I liked where Odyssey landed from that point of view, from sort of getting the tempo of magic to a place that it could be stable and that sustainable. Sustainable is really what I'm looking for, I think. Yeah, it's interesting that the,

one of the things, the reason you were brought on originally was a lot of Magic's early R&D people were not really developers. I mean, we're not, we were good at, here's crazy ideas, but we weren't really good at fine tuning it and making it viable in a tournament. Obviously, Urza Saga was us at our worst. us at our worst. And the reason you were brought on and other people following you was to get this sort of a pro-tour sensibility of

people that could really shape it. And I agree with you. I think Invasion, Odyssey, Onslaught, that sort of era was really a magic kind of being really developed for the first time in some way. In a serious way. Yeah, I mean, like I said, when I look back at that year and that's the thing that's the most memorable to me

it's the thing that i'm the most proud of everybody's the hero of their own narrative i suppose in terms of specific card anecdotes like it's weird it's like one of those things where you don't remember the wins the film is almost like you talk to professional poker players and they think this way right where you remember the bad beats like i just like psychic talk and shadow mage infiltrator how did i get that so wrong how did i do finkel so dirty that's uh that's the one that i keep coming back to that like it's so obviously wrong i mean it's a subtle thing it's not that big a deal like psychic talk was a cool card nobody shadow mage infiltrator didn't have to be Dark Confidant or Snapcaster Mage. The world is

fine. It's just such a clear mistake from a pure development point of view to have the uncommon accidentally overshadow the rare like that. A rare that we were trying to have put in an exciting spot. Yeah, I mean, it's funny. It's so easy. One of the things about design is how,

I mean, this is true, I think, of any creative endeavor, how when you look back at old things you've done, you're like, with all the knowledge I have now, I would have done that better. But like, you know, but had I not learned it then, had I not, you know, like, it's funny, like Odyssey, when I think of myself as a designer, I think Odyssey was like a really, really important part of my growth as a designer, I think Odyssey was a really, really important part

of my growth as a designer because I was trying some things and not all of them worked out, but I wouldn't have learned that had I not tried it. Odyssey, to me, is a very growth set, a learning set. I think I learned a lot as well. I think Onslaught is probably the best set, the single set I'm most proud of

from a lead developer point of view. And I'm sure Onslaught was only as good as it was because I sort of went through Odyssey and Saw and then got to watch it play out and see how yeah, this stuff kind of worked, but only for this chunk of the audience. Yeah, I feel

very similar. Do you remember the card Finkel actually submitted, by the way? Yeah, it was a Wrath that was uncomfortable, I think. So it's Wrath of Leknef. So no it's so it's wrath of lech neff right so first of all it's lech neff is sprinkled backwards so he's cast himself in the role of god and attempting to write himself into magic's continuity uh so kind of props to him for the attempt didn't work but a valiant attempt. It was one white, white, blue. One UWW. So it's Wrath of God

or mana, but he added a blue so that after the Wrath resolves, you get to untap four lands. So it's free Wrath of God is what he wanted to do. Because clearly, after you Wrath, you want to be able to counter their next threat, right? Totally reasonable and fair

magic. Yeah, what often happened with the Invitational cards is they would design something, and then we'd go back and work with them, and that was the card that we think we could make work. So, he did design the card that... Oh, yeah, yeah. We said no to Wrath of Black now, and he came back with Shadow Mage Infiltrator. Interestingly, he came back

with Shadow Mage Infiltrator exactly as we printed it. Yes. Like, 1 U B with exactly that text. And I think he regrets it, because he's like, clearly I didn't ask for enough. Like, if they didn't have to make it worse, then I didn't ask for enough. That's, I think, John's take on how we got here.

I think John might be the only card where what he designed to print exactly what he designed. I think everybody else we tweaked a little bit. And some of them we tweaked a lot. But yeah, I think as he designed it, it was how we printed it. I thought it was good. I thought he nailed it. Yeah, no, I thought it was a very well-designed card.

So, okay, so here's another interesting little story. What is your memory of the graveyard symbol? Oh, right. Yeah, it was sort of a controversial, an ongoing question, like do we need to remind people that this exists, right? We're doing this Graveyard Matters set. Should we facilitate people's ability to know this?

I don't know this exact story or anecdote you're fishing for here. Well, for the audience that doesn't know what I'm talking about, to the left of the name on Odyssey cards, if you had an ability that worked in the graveyard, you know, flashback or something that actively

worked, we put a little tombstone to the left of your name. So the idea is your graveyard is sort of fanned out anyway, you can just glance and see how many tombstones you have. Those are the ones you should read to make sure, to see what's going on that probably has an ability that's relevant. Right, and I

think the idea was, part of making a graveyard set was we were making you care about something that we've made you care about in tiny doses before, but never in the volume that this set. Like, yeah, in a normal magic set, maybe there's one or two cards, you know, there's some creature that can get itself out of the graveyard or something

but there's not a lot of cards that work in the graveyard and all of a sudden we're making a set where hey a lot of the cards work in the graveyard we have a whole mechanic that works in the graveyard and I think we felt we wanted to signify that so the interesting

real quickly the reason it didn't continue the plan was for all of magic we were going to it didn't continue the plan was for all of Magic we were going to do that that was the plan when we made this but then we changed over

to the new card frames with 8th edition and it didn't fit and so we ended up making it just an Odyssey block thing because it didn't fit in the new frame

but it was something I don't know it didn't fit in the new frame. But it was something, I don't know, like, it's fun when I look back at little things where, like, early Magic, we did not mess with the frame a lot. Like, nowadays, we're more than happy to mess with the frame. And this is one of the earliest of us sort of saying, hey,

maybe there's information, maybe we want to mess with the frame, maybe there's information we should be conveying for gameplay purposes. And it was kind of very ahead of its time because... Yeah, I hadn't thought of it that way. You're totally right. It's just a precursor to a lot of the stuff that's going on now. Yeah, so it's one of the things I like

from a magic historical, you know, magic history is, when do we do something that later, like we later would do, but like it's the early version of it. And that to me is a very early version of that. Yeah, totally is. So anyway, any final thoughts, Randy?

I can see my desk here, so I'm almost to work. No, I mean, it was, I thought a fun time for Magic, a very old set. We learned a lot from a set that i'm proud of even if it's yeah it's flawed but its flaws are also part of its charm it's one of those where it's like you can't really just fix little things and feel a lot better about it it's uh

well it was totally worth what we did. Like, we did a good thing there. At the end of the day, even if only a third of the audience loved it, I still thought it was a good set. A good thing to do. I mean, I think the one thing that's fun for maybe players that aren't familiar with Odyssey, because it's a long time ago, it's a fun set to go back and look at.

It really is... It's example, like I said, it's the spikiest set we've probably ever made as far as these blocks. I think... Here's the other thing I'll say about this. I think this is true. I might have to think more about it,

but I believe that at the time Odyssey was released, it was the best set for draft that had ever been released oh yeah i definitely think that's true yeah i think that and that was we put a lot of time into that like invasion i think is level a level up in terms of draft but like the multi-color stuff there's not enough multi-lands in invasion there's too many tappers. It's got some significant flaws. I think it's multicolor is so much fun that I think people look back on it nostalgically and people are still happy. If you want to do flashback drafts, it's still a set that people will go back to. But I mean, I think at the time Odyssey came out, I think for limited

bet draft environment, I feel like we got that into a really good place. Yeah. So I definitely thought that was, yeah, I think that was the best draft and I definitely know there are maybe that's biased in that I've talked to pros who are saying that was one of my favorite draft moments of all time pros who were like you know try to track down Odyssey packs to be able to go try that experience out again

yeah it's definitely one of the things that if right if you get your hands on Odyssey packs like it's even today it's a very fun thing. I mean, it's not something Magic has done a lot of. We haven't sort of, like, Magic has elements of this, but this really sort of took this quality and went whole hog in a way that no other set really has done.

So it is a lot, if you enjoy this kind of thing, it's a super fun set to draft. Yeah, it's both the first environment where we really made something matter that didn't matter before. That just isn't a thing that limited environments would do to sort of turn the game on its head and make this stuff matter. But then I also think it wound up in a good place. It wound up well-developed in addition to

having this innovative design. I think if you go back and play Invasion now, there's nostalgia for it, but you'll just curse the lack of mana-producing lands you need to do it correctly. I do think Odyssey holds up even now. It's for a certain style of player,

but if you're the style of player that really enjoys that, it's a super, super fun set. Yeah, that sounds right. Okay, so guys, I can see my desk. We all know what that means. It means it's time for me to stop talking about magic and start making magic. So Randy, thank you very much for joining us.

Thanks for having me. It was fun. And for everybody else, I will see you next time. Bye-bye.