Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #69 - Odyssey, Part 1

Episode Date: November 8, 2013

Mark explores the design of the fourth set he led, Odyssey.

Okay, I'm pulling out of my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so today is another design day where I talk about the design of a set I did, or set that I was on. Although today I actually did it. Today we're going to talk about Odyssey, a set from long ago. So let me give a little context of where this fits in for me. So the first set I ever did was Tempest, which I talked about in my very first podcast. The second set I ever did was Urza's Destiny. Either that or Unglued. I've tried to remember the order. But anyway, I did Urza's Destiny. I did Unglued. The fourth set I did was Odyssey.

And at that point, the only large set I had done was Tempest. And then, so what was going on at the time was Mike Elliott and I were the two major people doing design. And so we were constantly jockeying to try to get sets. And every once in a while, Joel and Bill were giving sets to other people. But I definitely was in the mix. And about once a year, I got to do something.

Although, for the point of Odyssey, it actually had been a little while. Because I had done Ursa's Destiny and Unglued, but I did not do anything in Mercadian Masked Block. And I, well, I was very involved in Invasion Block. I did not lead the design for any of the sets in Invasion Block. So I had not led a design in a little while, and I was itching, so I was very excited for Odyssey. And so today, I'm going to talk all about how Odyssey came to be. So let me start with the design team.

So the design team for Odyssey is interesting, because it was five people, Mike Donae, Richard Garfield, William Jockish, and Henry Stern. So I don't know how many of those names you recognize, so I'm going to talk about them. Um, okay, Richard Garfield, I'm sure you guys know, I've talked about Richard before, maybe one of these days I'll do a whole podcast about Richard. Um, but anyway, we've talked plenty about Richard. So let me talk about the other three. Um, okay, we'll start with Mike Donae.

So let me talk about the other three. Okay, we'll start with Mike Donais. So Mike Donais, I got to know Mike, his brother, Jeff Donais, for a long time worked at Wizards doing organized play, and in fact ran the Pro Tour for a while. He was the tournament organizer that ran the Pro Tour. And I got to know Mike through Jeff. So here's how the story goes.

So we were at Originsins Origins is a game convention run by Gamma and Bill had asked me if there was anybody that I thought would be a good fit for R&D and I said yes I thought there were three people I gave them three names

so the first was Randy Buehler the second was Brian Weissman who for those who know your Pro Tour history was one So the first was Randy Buehler. The second was Brian Weissman, who, for those who know your Pro Tour history, was one of the first real deck builders. He built a deck called The Deck, which was the first real magic deck that ever, in fact, the first magic deck for starters. I mean, it was really the first one that got disseminated. And he was the first person really on a public level to explain that concept of card advantage and his deck took great advantage of card advantage.

In fact, one of my favorite stories is, I lived in L.A. at the time, and we were traveling up to San Francisco to go to a tournament. We were playing, like, the winner got a set of legends or something. And we were buying motes in L.A. to take with us because down in LA

moats cost like a dollar and up in San Francisco moats cost like three or four dollars so we could buy a whole bunch of moats and sell them and the reason moats were so expensive was this is in the early days where information wasn't disseminated quite as fast

because the internet was young and in San Francisco everyone was playing the deck because of Brian and so moats were very expensive because everyone wanted them but down in LA no one of Brian, and so motes were very expensive because everyone wanted them. But down in L.A., no one knew anything about that, so motes weren't expensive.

I also love the fact that when I say expensive, you have three, four dollars. Anyway, there was a point in time, by the way, where, like, I did not want to buy moxes because they were, like, for five dollars. Who pays five dollars for a card? Anyway, a little history of magic. The third person who I recommended was Mike Donae.

So I don't remember quite what happened. I do know the following. Of the three people I recommended, only one, which was Randy Bueller, sat and talked with Bill. The other two basically didn't end up meeting with Bill. And at the end of the thing, Bill's like, so these people you recommended,

do they really want to work at Wizards? What happened with Mike was, Mike was the head judge of U.S. Nationals. And so he ended up not being able to meet with Bill because he was just too busy all week running U.S. Nationals. And so I explained this to Bill. And so what happened was, Mike was in town visiting his brother Jeff. And so I got this to Bill, and so what happened was Mike was in town visiting his brother Jeff.

And so I got Bill to my house, and I got Mike to my house, and the interview to interview Mike for the job was ended up doing in my house because I sort of got everybody together. In fact, one of the themes today, you'll see again with Henry, is somehow I recommend people, and then I have to go through a lot of energy to actually get them hired. But anyway, it worked out well. Mike ended up getting hired. Now, Mike was very much a developer.

He was on a few design teams. He was on this team. I know for sure he was also on Onslaught. But he did much more development than design. He was much more of a developer. He also spent some time on Magic Magic and then would also spend some time on Dungeons & Dragons. But anyway, Mike was on this team,

and I think this was his first design team. So William Jockish was... So I talk about there being several waves of R&D. So the first wave were the people that basically were the playtesters that worked with Richard. So we're talking Scaf Elias, Jim Lynn, Dave Petty, obviously Richard himself. That was like the first

wave. So the second wave of R&D was the ones where they were all busy doing other things, so Wizards was expanding and doing other games and stuff. And so they hired some people to take over the running of Magic. And that would be me, Bill Rose, William Jockish, Mike Elliott, and

Henry Stern, although Henry would come later. I'll explain that in a second. So Bill and William and I all started in October of 1995. Mike would start in January of 96. And Henry would start in September of 96. So anyway, William got the job because he wrote a letter to Richard Garfield. Now, William was a math professor. And Richard also, if you know your history, was once upon a time a math professor.

I think they both were in combinatorics, which is counting for those who don't know math. And, well, I mean, fancy, fancy counting. And so William wrote a letter and he just—I'm not even sure what he wrote. I never saw the letter, but he impressed Richard. He just impressed him, and Richard knew they were looking for people, and so Richard just offered him a job. And that's the only person I know who just, like, sort of blindly wrote a letter and ended up with a job in R&D. So William is interesting. William was definitely, of that second wave of people,

was the most developer-y. I mean, I guess Henry was also very developer-y. But, I mean, Mike and I were more designer types, even though we were hired as developers. Bill sort of split the middle, you know, did design, did development, you know, definitely kind of in the middle. But William was like a developer in the sense that, like, his head was, you know, like, he knew numbers and he would crunch things. But the interesting thing about William was William has some very quirky ideas about deck building.

And so one of his concepts was that you had to be careful if a card in number would be a problem. that you had to be careful if a card in number would be a problem. So he would allow himself to use as many if he wanted of a card because he was trying to figure out whether this idea in conglomerate would be a problem. And in fact, one time, I forget which core set, but he built a deck with some crazy number of Psychic Venoms. So Psychic Venom is a blue enchant land that whenever enchanted land is tapped, it does two damage to its controller. And somehow he made a deck that was crazy good

and won and convinced us not to put Psychic Venom in a core set, which is kind of funny because it's a weak card. But somehow, if you have enough of them, he had some deck you couldn't beat. Although, once again, I should stress, when I do my R&D podcast

about the waves of R&D, the second wave was not what we think of as modern-day developers, really. That mostly happened starting in the third wave. I mean, William and Henry were the closest we had to sort of real developers. Henry, I would argue, is the very first, like, off-the-protour developer. William was kind of the pre-us doing that. So one of the things that happened in the early days is that, you imagine,

there wasn't like, like right now, R&D are people who like grew up living and breathing magic. And that just wasn't, that didn't exist when I got hired. I mean, magic was only a couple years old. So mostly they hired people

that were just kind of smart and that, you know, loved magic. But we weren't as, I mean, it hadn't been as much a part of our lives because it just hadn't been out that long. So William was a hoot. My favorite William story, so I used to explain that when I used to go home, I'd have fun stories for each of the people so that I could tell eccentric stories about my coworkers. The story I used to tell about William is William used to order pizza every day,

and they'd have it delivered to him. So one day, we're in the pit talking or something, and William's phone rings. And he picks it up, and he goes, Yeah? Yeah, it's William. Yeah, pepperoni. Okay, bye. And we're like, what was that? He goes, oh, it's the pizza place.

They hadn't heard from you, so they called me. And we're like, you got that? He goes, oh, it's a pizza place. They hadn't heard from you, so they called me. And we're like, you got the pizza place to call you? So anyway, that's like, Wayne was dedicated. He managed to get the pizza. He didn't have to call the pizza place. They called him. So anyway, I thought that was funny. Okay, the last person on the design team was Henry Stern.

So when I, once upon a time, I worked at a game store called The Game Keeper. I've talked about this. And I was the one that got Magic into the store. I learned about it, and then I bought it at a convention. Anyway, I came back all gung-ho. We have to buy it. We have to buy it. This is the best game ever. And I convinced my store to start carrying it. Now, one of the things we did in the store was we used to always open one of a game so we can demo the game. Because what I learned is if you demo a game, it increases your ability to sell it, I mean, 10, 20, 30-fold.

For example, by the way, one of the things I was very, very proud of. So there's a game called Set, which is a pattern recognition game, if you've never played it. You basically, I can't even describe it. You have to kind of see it. But it's this neat game, if you've never played it. You basically, I can't even describe it. You have to kind of see it. But it's this neat game. It's this little card game, not too expensive. So there were 26 Gamekeeper stores at the time I worked there. I was working part-time at my store. So I started demoing Set because I found it was a really good, it was an easy game to sell because it was a neat game. A lot of people didn't know about it.

If you got someone to play with you for a few minutes they would buy it. All you had to do was show it to them they'd play it and go, oh this is cool, and they'd buy it. I managed to sell more set for our store and I was the only one in my store selling set. No one in my store was selling it. Our store sold more sets of me than the other 25 stores combined.

So anyway I always thought it was funny that, like, part-time, I sold more of this game than everybody else in the entire business. And that's because I demoed it. And so I had Magic, and I would demo Magic. And one of the things I did was I started getting a hang of the rarities. I mean, they weren't official at the time, but I got a good sense of what cards were showing up at what rarity.

And so I had a little thing I allowed, which was if people came in, I let them trade with the demo deck. As long as they traded one for one, the cards had to not be in the deck that I had, so you couldn't duplicate things. And you had to match rarity, and I was the determiner of rarity. to match rarity, and I was the determiner of rarity. So anyway, Henry Stern came in my shop one day, and I, he, I guess he already played Magic, but I, I let him trade stuff out of the deck, and then he came back, and he used to come back every once in a while just to see, you know, if there were new cards in the starter deck. And so it was funny, because we built up a rapport, kind of just him stopping in. And then at one point, he invited me to something. And then we realized that we knew each other from the games. Like, I guess I

went on some, you know, Magic Net or something and I was looking for other people in LA to play Magic with and he responded. And then we figured out that we knew each other from the game store. And then like he lived two blocks away from me. So anyway, Henry and I became friends. So when I moved up to L.A. I'm sorry, moved up from L.A., at some point I was asked if I knew anybody. This is a common question. Did I know anybody who would make a good fit for R&D?

And I said, oh, yes, my friend Henry I thought would be a good fit. And so they asked Henry for stuff. And Henry dragged his feet for a while. I'm not sure why. But he took a while a while to get it so finally he sent up his stuff and one day I was looking through something and I saw I saw a bunch of papers and like I realized

that there was like a a no pile and that Henry had been moved to the no pile and I didn't know why and so around the same time we had done the very first Pro Tour in New York. I talked about that on another podcast. And we made a video, which, by the way, deserves its own podcast because the making of the video is quite the story. Anyway, we needed to redo the commentary on the video because it was all messed up.

And so I wanted to do a color commentator, which I used a guy named Sean Carnes who worked in R&D. At the time, actually, he might not have been in R&D yet. He might have still been in customer service.

Anyway, Sean Carnes was known as Captain Volume. At one point in the pit, by the way, I was the third loudest member of the pit. For those that don't know, I'm very loud.

And number one was Sean Carnes, Captain Volume, who used to scream things at the top of his lungs. I merely talk loudly. I don't scream. Well, sometimes. Okay, so I used Sean to be my color commentator. Sorry, I used him to be my play-by-play, and I needed a color commentator,

and so I got Henry. I brought Henry up from L.A. because he was not too far away, he could stay at my place, good wazzy times, Henry stayed at my place. But anyway, I brought Henry up, and I had two goals in mind. One was, I thought Henry would be good,

but the second was, I wanted people to meet Henry. I felt like, you know, Henry's whatever, his letter, whatever, his resume hadn't made a good first impression. Henry, by the way, is funny, is before Henry worked for Wizards, he was an engineer that literally did,

made rockets for Hughes. And so we joked that Henry was literally a rocket scientist. That R&D had hired rocket scientists. Or a rocket scientist. But anyway, I got Henry to meet everybody, and once Henry met everybody, he's very personable, that he really sort of turned it around,

and we got him off the no-pile onto the maybe-pile, and then eventually he ended up getting a job. Henry actually got the job, but asked to play in Worlds, pushed back his starting of his job, so he could play in Worlds of 96. And he ended up top four, and he actually did back-to-back top fours,

which not too many people have done. So he sort of left the pro tour on a high of doing really well in his last tournament. And so we brought Henry. So it's interesting, by the way, if you've noticed as I'm talking about, Mike and William and Henry were all developers and not really designers.

Now, obviously, Richard was a designer and I was a designer. So this was a development-heavy team. Like I said a designer, and I was a designer. So this was a development-heavy team. Like I said, both Richard and I are pretty good at making lots of cards, so we were fine. So one of the things about this design is I talk about magic having ages, that the design has ages. You see, the R&D have waves, but magic has ages. So the first age, or the golden age, is alpha through alliances. I'll do a podcast on this at some point.

But the first age is more about focusing on cards and just having cards that resonate. The second age was mirage through prophecy. And that was more about making blocks, sort of getting magic refocused and the idea that blocks exist. So invasion was the start of the third wave, if you will. Or not wave.

Wave is the people. It's age, third age. So invasion introduced the idea of a theme, that the block was a multicolored block. It was about something. Before that, you know, it's sort of like, well, what's the block about? Well, here's the two new mechanics. That was the big thing.

You know, what's Mirage about? Well, it's got African sort of setting and it's about flanking and phasing. You know, Tempest, well, there's a story going on and it's about shadow and buyback. You know, and Echo, Urza Saga, well, there's some more backstory and it's about shadow and buyback, you know, and Echo, Urza Saga was, well, there's some more backstory and it's about cycling and Echo, you know. And the

innovation of Invasion really was like, look, we're, the block is going to have a theme and it's going to be about something sort of mechanically, have a mechanical identity. And so Invasion obviously had a multicolored identity. So when it came time to do Odyssey, I was like, okay, I want an identity. And the one I was very excited about was the idea of doing the graveyard. So Weather to Light had messed around the graveyard, and The Dark had messed around a little bit with the graveyard, but there hadn't been a whole block on it.

It had just been individual sets that messed around a little bit. And I thought there was a lot of potential there. Also, so the interesting thing was at this time, while this was going on, we, the current, the current creative team kind of was dissolving.

And so Bill came to me and said, okay, Mark, I have nobody to do names and flavor text. Could you, for Odyssey, could you do names and flavor text? And I said, sure, sure, I can do names and flavor text. And so during Odyssey, it was us building up the new creative team, which was a different creative team than the current creative team.

And so I wasn't in charge of story. Other people were doing story. But I wasn't in charge of names and flavor people were doing story, but I wasn't charged with names and flavor text. I did a lot of card concepting. I, uh, I, I mean, I was in charge of sort of making the cards make sense. Now, if you'll notice, I don't know if you noticed, but for those that know Odyssey, um, I definitely pushed flavor text and names a little bit. Um, there's names like Need for Speed and, uh a car called Gorilla Titan that had the flavor text

it shows a gorilla holding up his hand and the flavor text was, I want a banana this big and the funny thing about that was that originally we had a very serious piece of flavor text and the art came in and it was a silly looking gorilla who by the way, if you've never noticed before has a tail, no one ever notices that, but he has a tail

because obviously in Dominaria, giant gorillas have tails this silly-looking gorilla, who, by the way, if you've never noticed before, has a tail. No one ever notices that, but he has a tail. Because, obviously, in Dominaria, giant gorillas have tails. And I needed a new caption, so I just put it up on the board and had people write captions. And that was my favorite caption. And I thought it was very funny. It's funny.

It's one of the... There's a few pieces of Flavor Text in history that managed to make the top five and the bottom five for Flavortex in their own set. And that was one of them. It was loved, as I like to say, beloved and behated. I'm still working on making behated to work. I'm just going to keep using

behated until it actually becomes English. One day Webster will call me up and go, Hello, Mr. Rosewater. We are proud to tell you that finally, behated is being added to the next edition. And then I'll have a little party. Okay, I don't think they actually call people. But in my dreams they do.

Okay, so this is the fun of me doing my podcast. I'm just jumping around. I'm not sure. Anyway, this is how my mind works. So a little insight into my psyche. Okay, so we had our designers. I knew I wanted to do a top-down graveyard theme. Okay, so let me talk about the two main mechanics, because we were still...

Well, it's funny. So what happened was, you know, Mirage had two main mechanics, Tempest had two main mechanics, Urza Saga had two main mechanics. So we get some Arcadian Masks, and Arcadian Masks didn't name them. We had mechanics. So we get some Arcadian Masks. And Arcadian Masks didn't name them. We had mechanics. You know, we had rebels and mercenaries, and we had spell shapers, and we had mechanics, but we didn't name them. They didn't

have a word. And everybody, I mean, almost everybody were like, yeah, why didn't you guys put mechanics in Arcadian Masks? We're like, well, they're mechanics. There's new things. Like, just not naming them, we realized that players, it just somehow mentally wasn't there if they weren't named. And so after Mercantile Masks was Invasion,

so we started naming stuff again. I think Invasion only had buyback. Did it have... Funny thing is it had domain and we didn't name domain. So anyway, we decided with Odyssey, we're going back to having two named mechanics. So let me talk about them. The two name mechanics are Flashback and Threshold.

Both pretty influential in Magic design, by the way. Okay, so Flashback, the history of Flashback is this, is once upon a time, I used to run the feature match area at the Pro Tours. Now, I did the podcast on the feature, the very first Pro Tour, and I explained that one of, probably my biggest contribution to the feature, I'm sorry, to the Pro Tour was the creation of feature matches and the feature match area. And so what I did for most of the Pro Tour, I went to about eight years with the Pro Tours, every Pro Tour for about eight years, was I ran the feature match area. So what that meant was I selected the matches, and then I was one of the judges. Usually I had a judge helping me out,

and the feature match was always four matches. And so I spent a lot of time watching feature matches. And one of my little games, sometimes, you know, Magic often has very dynamic, exciting games, but sometimes, you know, one person gets ahead, and in my head, whenever someone would get ahead, I would give little rules to the guy behind in my head to see what he could do.

And I think this idea... I think Vanguard came out of this idea also, by the way. Vanguard and Flashback have a similar origin. But anyway, I would sit there and give them abilities. So one of the abilities I gave them was you can cast cards out of your graveyard. And I always thought that was a neat idea. And so finally, when we got to the graveyard, I'm like, well, what are they just cards that let you cast them out of the graveyard? And I think early on, the first version of it, they just had one cost and the idea was

you could play them on your hand or out of your graveyard and they were a little expensive out of your hand but the fact that you could get them out of your graveyard

made them good this by the way is a very common thing we try and design we try to have a singular casting cost like Bastogne was the same way

there's a lot of sets where we always start there and then it's always like well we have more ability to have knobs to turn and develop and have easier time if we break apart the things, which we did here.

And I think the idea was always that they went away when you used them the second time, because it felt kind of abusive. It felt too buyback. You just kept reusing them all the time. And so the idea of Flashback was you got a second use out of your graveyard. Oh, also, here's a funny story.

So we did a bunch of survey stuff. We always do market research. And we learned that at the time that the top two mechanics were buyback and flashback. And so we joked that the key to a popular mechanic is you need the word back in it. And so for a while, we would name all our mechanics with back in them. Here's the name, but here's the name of the thing we're going to go with, and we'd have a name with back in it.

By the way, the actual answer is players like doing things twice, or more than once. Okay, so I introduced that. The team liked it. It's turned out, by the way, Flashback has turned out to be... So we have what I call evergreen mechanics, which means we use them all. We're able to use them every set. Not

all evergreen mechanics are used every set, but we're allowed to use them every set. And then, I don't know what to call this. Deciduous? I'm not sure what the correct term for this is. The idea of something that you could use, not all the time, so like cycling and scry and Flashback was like, well, we're going to use these more often than we use most mechanics, but, you know, in a five-year period, there's a decent chance you'll see it, you know, but it's not

evergreen, but it's one-dot, semi-evergreen. I'm not quite sure what to call it. I need a name for it. And flashback's definitely one of those mechanics that just had a lot of legs. I talk about laticular design. Something I work a lot on is

trying to figure out designs that don't throw the beginner but give the advanced player a lot of strategic depth. And flashback's been pretty good in that the beginner kind of gets it, you know, but they're not as vigilant about watching the graveyard, understanding when to use it, or understanding the value of having the second use.

And so it has a lot of, you know, interesting gameplay for the advanced player. And it's not, you know, it's something that the beginner has proven to be able to get. Anyway, side note. Okay, so the other mechanic was threshold. So Richard Garfield came up with threshold. So I think Richard was very interested in the idea of cards that had an A-B state, meaning they were in an A state and they shifted to a B state based upon a threshold, some criteria that you had to meet.

I think the idea started with the graveyard. I talked to Richard about how I was interested in the graveyard, and so Richard had been messing around with the idea started with the graveyard. I talked to Richard about how I was interested in the graveyard. And so Richard had been messing around with the idea of having a threshold. And so the way it worked was, originally, the threshold would have a number. And if you had that many cards in your graveyard, then it turned on. So, for example, you might have threshold four and threshold six and threshold seven. So the problem was, when you played that, it was mind-melting. I mean, because the problem was, so let's say, for example, you have a four, six, and seven in play, you know, or whatever. I have a four

in play, my opponent has a six in play, then I have a seven in play. And so it's like, okay, now I have five cards in my graveyard. Okay, so my four is turned on, but his six is turned off and my seven is turned off. But if he plays a card and I respond to it, then he'll have six, and his things will turn on, but my seven won't turn on yet. But I can cast a spell, and if I do, I'm like, hi, what's going on? Who is what?

It's hard enough to track A and B states. So we finally came to the conclusion that we wanted things on and off. Well, first thing, the intermediary was we actually had little threshold and big threshold. Like, little threshold was like four cards and big threshold, I think, was seven. And what we found was even that was too much. And so we ended up having one threshold, which was seven. And we did mess around with a whole bunch of different thresholds.

We tried at different numbers. I think design actually handed it off at seven. And development, like, design messed around with it for a while, figured out seven was correct. and design messed around with it for a while, figured out 7 was correct. Then development messed around with it a while, figured out 7 was correct. And one of the problems about threshold, for those that listen to my Lessons Learned podcast where I talk about Odyssey, which I think is in Lesson Learned 1, one of the problems was it ended up being I made a classic mistake in which

I was messing around with fundamentals to mess around with them because it was intellectually interesting to do so. So, for example, I talked about Brian Weissman introducing the idea of card advantage. So Odyssey said, you know what, let's turn card advantage on his ear. So, for example, there was a cycle of cards

that all, in fact, they were dogs. They were a cycle of dogs. Okay, quick aside. So Randy Buehler just started working. Randy Buehler was on the development for Invasion, and his first lead development, I believe, was Odyssey. And his friend was a guy named Eric Lauer, who's now the head developer. By the way, Eric just, and this has happened many weeks ago because I'm in the past, but

Eric recently just officially got the title of head developer, so he's my opposite on development. He's essentially been that for a while, but he got the title, which is really nice, so congratulations, Eric. Now, Eric was a friend of Randy's. In fact, Randy would get Eric hired later on. But Eric at the time was not working for Wizards. And Eric loved dogs. And so Randy made the cycle and asked me if we could make some dogs. And I said, I was in charge of the creative at the time, if you remember. So it was my call what the creature types were.

So I said, okay, we can make them dogs. And that's where Wild Mongrel and Patrol Hound, and anyway, there's one in each color. And the white one was famous because you would discard it to give things first strike. And one of the problems with the set was the correct play was to discard your whole hand to Patrol Hound to give it first strike,

even though you didn't care it had first strike. And I'm like, that's not really making sense to people. So I have a hand of cards that I want to play, but the correct move is to throw them away and not play them to give an ability to my creature that I don't even care if my creature has. Yeah, Wizards, that sounds fun. And, you know,

I don't want to throw my hand away to the Hound. So, oh, quick aside, second aside. It's a side day. Although every day with me is a side day. Hounds. So, one of the things was, when we first started making cards with dog on them, the first few were actually

hounds. I think one was like, Ice Age had like a St. Bernard, actually I don't know if St. Bernard is even a hound, but there were some early ones that were like hellhounds and stuff, and so there's this big fight whether to call them dog or call them hound, and because

hellhound was more fantasy-like, they wanted to call them hounds. And I had this big argument because I'm like, hounds are a subset of dog. Like, we do cat. We don't do panther. We do cat. And so we should do dog.

And I could not win that fight. And every once in a while, it comes back up. And every, I keep losing the fight. I don't know how I can, it's a dog. Hound is a subset. Dog is the broad thing. Like, anyway, I cannot win the fight. I don't know how I can... It's a dog! Hound is a subset! Dog is the broad thing! Like, anyway, I cannot win this fight. It keeps coming up, but I keep losing.

And I, like, it is so frustrating when, like, you just, like, I know I should win this. I know I'm in the right, and I cannot win. But anyway, so hounds are hounds and not dogs. One day. One day. I'm stubborn. I'm not going anywhere. dogs.

One day. One day. I'm stubborn. I'm not going anywhere. So anyway, one of the problems with Odyssey was it kind of made you do some stuff that if you understood what was going on, like, I used to say that Odyssey might be one of the spikiest sets we ever made. Because if you understood, oh, I see, I need to throw away cards

because that actually is advantageous. Oh, it's interesting. Oh, card advantage doesn't work. That if you understand the nuances. But the problem was that I made a set that, like, you know, you had to be very experienced to even understand what was going on. And the low-end user was not fun for them. And so that was one of the big problems with Odyssey, one of the lessons of Odyssey.

But at the time, we were trying to enable threshold and flashback, and so one of the ways that we did that was gave you a lot of ways to get cards in your graveyard. And, you know, this is going to be a two-parter, so

I decided I'm going to wait for next week to get into how we got, because we started with Graveyard, and what happened was that it spread from there, and so one of the things that I'm famous for, or was in the early days, I'm not a veteran, was like when I turned into Tempest, it was chock full. I mean, Tempest, for example, not only had Shadow and Buyback, it also had Echo and Cycling. Yes, both mechanics

from the set that came after it were in it. And we had a whole bunch of other mechanics. It had cards. Like, there was a point in time where a card from Tempest Design went in a finished product for like three years or something. Starting with Weatherlight, the set before it.

Weatherlight borrowed Gemstone Mine from it. It's called Three Shot City of Brass. And anyway, so I was pretty well known at the time for overstuffing my sets. And by the way, this is a very common early designer thing, which is you get a set. Oh my God, you're so excited. Oh my God, I finally, I get to make magic. I get to make a magic set.

I have so many ideas. And you just use them all, you know. I don't know whether it's this fear that you don't know whether you'll have another chance. I don't know if you're just so excited that you want to demonstrate what you can do. But beginning designers, like one of the things which is funny is

what you really want to do is say, what is the least I need to do to accomplish my task? Because designs are a resource. You don't want to waste a resource, you know, and that, the way I sort of explain it is like, let's say I want to make my kids happy, you know, and so I take them for some dessert, and I give them some dessert. But I don't need to take them for ice cream, and fudge, and popsicles, and donuts, and, you know, I don't need, I need, I need to take them for ice cream and fudge and popsicles and donuts. And, you know, I don't need, I need to give them enough that they're happy and they have their dessert and they're filled. But I don't need, like, you know, that you don't need to overdo it.

And that with design, it's important. And this is true, by the way, of any design, which is, I talk about how in writing, they say, you know, if you're going to make a movie, you know, if the line can be pulled from the movie, if the scene can be pulled from the movie, if anything can be pulled from the movie, pull it. If the movie will exist without one portion of it, then it doesn't need it to survive, then it is not necessary and yank it. You know, and writing is all about getting the bare minimum of what you need. Turns out, game design is the same way. Game design is figure out what you need, do the minimum

of what you need, and make it, I mean, it needs to deliver what it needs to deliver. I'm not saying do nothing, but I'm saying you have to figure out not, is what's the least you need? You know, what's the least you need to accomplish a task at hand? And Magic has a lot of things going on. It's complex. There's a lot of things that need set, and it's not that we don't

load up sets with things, but we're careful not to overload sets. But back in the day, way back in the day, because when I talk about Odyssey, by the way, Odyssey came out in 2001, the fall of 2001. So this was a while ago, although interestingly enough, I'd been at Wizards for a while before I did Odyssey. But I've been at Wizards a long time. In fact, by the time you hear this, I will have been a wizard for 18 years, which still kind of boggles my mind.

Basically, I can graduate from wizard's high. Okay, so I see my work. So the reason I didn't want to get into this part, and I'm saving this for part two, is... So we started with the graveyard, and from there, we went everywhere. And so in my next installment, and from there, we went everywhere. And so, in my next installment, my next podcast, I want to talk about kind of how we started with a very simple task of doing the graveyard set, and ended up doing all sorts of crazy things. And also, eventually, I will talk about some cards, and talk about how different things came to be. Also, because

this set, I was in charge of the creative, I have a whole mess of stories about the creative. So I will share those with you as well. But right now, I got to go inside because it is time for me to be making magic. I'll talk to you... Sorry.

I'll talk to you guys next time. It was fun having you.