Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #70 - Odyssey, Part 2

Episode Date: November 15, 2013

Mark continues discussing the first set design he led, Odyssey.

Okay, I'm pulling out of the parking lot. You all know what that means. Actually, maybe you don't. So my son Adam had an orthodontist appointment today and I had to take him there and I just dropped him off at school. So I'm starting my podcast from school because that's where my drive to work starts. So it is still drive to work because I still have to go to work. And as I explained before, I've done podcasts from the school. It's a ways, it's close to my, home is close to my school, so. Hopefully you will get the same amount of content today.

Okay, so last we talked, I was talking about the design of Odyssey. And I introduced you to the design team, and I talked about the creation of the two main mechanics, flashback and threshold. So today I was going to talk about, oh yeah, that's where I left off. I was explaining how we started with a simple theory of the graveyard and how things kind of exploded from there. So let me start by talking about the graveyard. So one of the things that's interesting about the graveyard as a mechanic or as a, you know, as a theme is, so the graveyard is interesting in that it's part of the game. The graveyard is there. Now normally, normally the graveyard doesn't matter is there. Now, normally, normally, the graveyard

doesn't matter too much. Now, even in Alpha, Richard made a few cards that cared. You know, he had Raise Dead that could get something back from the graveyard. He had Animate Dead, which could, you know, animate a creature from the graveyard. He had Nether...

Nether... He had a creature that could attack back from out of the graveyard. Nether shadow. So, I mean, even in the very earliest part of the game, you know, the graveyard... There was a little bit of caring about the graveyard. And as it went along, the dark was the first set that really kind of said,

hey, maybe we should play around with this as a resource. And so the Dark definitely was the first set, I think, that used the graveyard as a resource, where you would chew cards out of the graveyard to do things. And the Dark was, I mean, I'll get to the Dark one these days. It was a set that was definitely trying to get a tone. And so the Dark was the first set to mess with the graveyard mechanically,

as a theme. Obviously, Alpha and other sets cared on some cards. And then Weatherlight was the next time where we just had a graveyard, a set with a graveyard-centered theme. Now, Weatherlight was even more graveyard-centered than the dark. The dark was really about mood and tone,

and the graveyard was a portion of it, but a small portion. Where Weatherlight pretty much, that was the major mechanic, the major focus of Weatherlight was the graveyard. It didn't mess around with using the graveyard in a lot of different ways. Some simple, some complicated. And along the way, every set kind of

touched upon it. I mean, it's one of those things where I feel like a lot of our themes, most sets touch upon the theme. For example, tribal. Most sets have some tribal. Most sets do a little bit of tribal. But some sets do more tribal. And the graveyard's the same thing.

Most sets care about the graveyard a little bit. Usually black common has a way to get a creature back, and usually black uncommon has a way to animate something. And depending on what we're doing, sometimes blue will get back a spell, or white gets back an enchantment, sometimes an artifact. Depending on the set and what you're trying to do, there's always a little bit of graveyard use.

But when you focus on the graveyard, so Odyssey was the first block to focus on the graveyard, and the third set that had a graveyard component. So what I was interested in was figuring out all the different ways you could use the graveyard. So let me walk through a little bit just to start talking about, like, what... kind of examine, like, what a resource allows you as a designer. Okay, so for starters, there's things in a graveyard. So number one is you can have graveyard as a zone,

meaning that you can interact with it as zone and do what we call zone changes. So obviously I just talked about those. So like Raise Dead is graveyard to hand. Animate Dead or any of the animation spells is graveyard to the battlefield. There are also some cards that will get the graveyard and put it back into the library.

And there are cards that will exile them, that take them from the graveyard zone and put them into the exile zone. So that's zone manipulation. In the graveyard... Now, the game naturally puts things in the graveyard.

You cast a spell and it goes to the graveyard. You kill a creature and it goes to the graveyard. The graveyard a creature and it goes to the graveyard. The graveyard is the natural resting place for things that have been used. So if you're messing around with the graveyard... Oh, but one of the ways to get the graveyard that is not used as much in a normal set is milling, which is library to graveyard.

So when you care about the graveyard, one of the things you do is you find more ways to get things from the graveyard to other places, and you find more ways to get things into the graveyard. Number two is graveyard as resource. And what that means is, I have cards in the graveyard. Normally, it doesn't mean anything. They're just where I put my cards that go away. But when you care about the graveyard as a resource, all of a sudden, you know,

I start, usually you exile cards to do something. Flashback did it in a different way where the cards had a value in the graveyard. It's a little different. I mean,

well, I guess, yeah, Flashback falls in this category because what basically I'm talking about is the cards have some utility.

And the resource divides into two groups, I guess, technically. There is a resource where I'm just eating it up, like, you must exile a creature card to do something. And that's like, oh, well, unless I have the creature card as the cost, then I can't do it. The other thing is like flashback, which is cards that have sort of a use in the graveyard, where the idea is if I get these cards in the graveyard, they have a use. And those cards, there's a couple different kinds of those cards.

First off, there's like flashback, which is one-time use. That if I get in the graveyard, you know, it essentially is a graveyard is a resource card, but it's built into it. Rather than get rid of a spell in the graveyard, get rid of me in the graveyard. Now, there also also some cards that... Let's see if we do graveyard resource. There's some cards where, like Nether Shadow, that can return themselves from the graveyard, so that if you get them into the graveyard,

there's some inherent resource there. There's some cards that, while in the graveyard, have a function, bridge from below, in Judgment, what do they call it? I call them the Jedis. But the anger, and they're all named after emotions. And they granted your creatures an ability if this card was in your graveyard.

So graveyard as a resource really means that I want to get cards in my graveyard because if they're in my graveyard, I can use them in some way. Maybe it increases the number of options in my hand. Maybe it's just a resource I can use to be able to do things cheaper. Dredge is another example of a graveyard resource because Dredge says, oh, well, I can use up cards in the graveyard to make my spell cheaper. The third category is what I call graveyard as barometer. And what that means is things care about what's in the graveyard, but it makes things in your hand or in play stronger.

Examples of this would be like Kindle or Lurgoif. Let me talk about Kindle and Lurgoif real quick, because Kindle and Lurgoif are actually both in Odyssey. There's a cycle of Kindles and there's a cycle of Lurgois. And the idea, by the way, of graveyardist resource is saying, the reason you want to get cards in your graveyard is it makes things you have in hand and on the battlefield more powerful. Now, you'll notice, if you look at Odyssey, I employed all of these. I did all there was lots of zone changes, there was lots of resource, and there was lots of barometer using of a graveyard. So let me walk through and talk

about each of those. I guess I should go in order. Okay, so graveyard is zone change. So one of the things that you'll find is if your graveyard has your graveyard means something, there's power to it, because when graveyard matters, having cards in your graveyard is a good thing. And so what that means is two things. First off, it means because you're messing with the graveyard, there's this anticipation that you're doing more manipulating with the graveyard. You're pulling more things out of the graveyard. more manipulating with the graveyard. You're pulling more things out of the graveyard. So a graveyard

set will do more pulling things back, more regrowing, as we call it, from the graveyard. And usually what you'll do is normally, in a normal set, black will raise dead, meaning it gets back a creature at common.

And green will often have a regrowth-like effect, which means it gets back any card, and that usually happens, usually at rare, sometimes at uncommon, depending on the set. Now, one of the things we've done is that magic has a normal default, and then when you push certain themes, what you find is you have to kind of give...

So if I'm going to do a graveyard matter set, normally black cares about the graveyard, green cares about the graveyard, and white cares a little bit about the graveyard. But blue and red, not too much. But you're like, oh, we're going to do graveyard matters, I have to ramp that up a little bit. And so you make, you find ways to make things care. So one of the things we've done, and the Odyssey actually, I'm pretty sure, did this, which was you want to give each color something it can get back from the graveyard when it needs to. So what we've done is black obviously gets back creatures, because that's just a staple thing we do all the time.

Green has the ability to get back anything. creatures, because that's just a staple thing we do all the time. Green has the ability to get back anything, but if we do a cycle, like we do in Odyssey, the very common thing to get green get back is land. What we do is we let blue get back instants,

red get back sorceries, and we give white artifacts and enchantments. And so you'll notice that those things are true, that the colors can do those things. They can get those things back. And they will get those things back sometimes even out of graveyard sets, but it's something we do

at a much lower level. Whereas, like, you know, blacks raise dead and greens regrowth, you don't see it constantly. That's something you see in a lot of sets. The other thing that we tend to do is just the number of, like, reanimation spells just the number of like reanimation spells the number of spells that make use of things in the graveyard in a set of both the graveyard our tolerance goes up essentially whatever we care about when that's the focus we go okay you know i mean the two big things happen when you're when you shift into focus one is you tend to move down and rarity

some stuff you see this in artifact sets for, where normally there's not a lot of common artifacts. There's a few mana fixing, maybe equipment or two, but usually there's not that many common artifacts. But you get to a world in which artifacts are the focus, and all of a sudden you shift down. There's a lot more artifacts that come in. And the same is true for the graveyard stuff, is that when you're making it about the graveyard,

for example, blue and common, usually if blue's going to get back spells, usually we do that uncommon, every once in a while uncommon, but in a graveyard set, very likely that's a common, or red getting back a sorcery, which is something that you won't see very often. We might actually do that a common in a graveyard matter set, which we would not do that in a normal set. The other

thing that you do when you have your theme is you increase frequency, which means you do more of it. So in a graveyard focus set, you would just do more reanimation, more raising, more regrowing, just more things that allow you to get things back from the graveyard. Now, but the more important thing is not getting things out from the graveyard. Now, the more important thing is not getting things out of the graveyard, even though you do more of that in the graveyard set. The bigger thing is getting things into your graveyard. And so the reason for this is that

if your graveyard is valuable, you want to give people more tools to get things in their graveyard. Now, there's two major ways we do this, or three ways, I guess. One is that, well, let's talk about the different things. So we'll take from the battlefield. Things are going to die, so the battlefield naturally gets things there. The one thing you'll do in a graveyard set is you're slightly more likely to have sac effects on creatures and on permanents,

meaning that it's fun to kind of say, oh, well, I know I care about the graveyard as a resource. Oh, well, the board gives me a little more ways to manipulate to get extra things in the graveyard. So usually sac effects are a little bit higher in a graveyard set. Oh, and in general also, we're more willing to make creatures that will die in combat. Sometimes in a graveyard set, you'll see toughness go down just a little bit because you kind of want to create combat where things are going to die just because you want to get the graveyards full. So that's another change you'll see on the graveyard.

But a change on the battlefield affecting it in the graveyard set. Remember, one of the things that you're trying to focus on is you're saying, okay, I'm making the stuff for the battlefield. I want to get things in the graveyard. Now, the game naturally does that, so that helps. But you goose it a little bit. In general, what you want to do is whatever the set's about, you just push toward that theme a little bit. Like every set has things to sacrifice.

But let's say, I'm just making a number here, but let's say that number is, you know, 2%. Maybe in a set of other graveyards it goes to 4% or 5%. You just ratchet it up a little bit. By the way, I'm sitting in traffic, so I predict a little extra material for you today. Which is very funny, because when I sit in traffic, when I do my podcast, part of me is like, ugh, traffic. But part of me is like, oh, traffic, but part of me is like, ah, I can talk more. So I guess my podcasting has helped my attitude toward traffic

because at least I see the silver lining, which is you guys get more material. And I like talking about design, so win-win. Although I'm still not a fan of traffic. Okay, so the bigger thing is, okay, we have battlefield. So you want to get things from the battlefield into the graveyard. Okay, we goose that a little bit, make it a little easier. Second thing is your hand. There's two ways to get stuff in your hand. One is casting spells, but you're going to cast spells, so not much we need to do that.

The one that we might do is, in graveyard set, is we might make the spells a little cheaper. We might give you more cantrips, meaning we might, like, the reason cantrips are great is they tend to be a little on the cheaper side, and they not only fill up your graveyard, but they replace it, so there's not loss of card advantage.

So we'll do that. And then the other thing we'll do is we tend to make discarding, usually as a cost, a little bit higher in a set about the graveyard. And once again, magic always does that. Every set there's a little bit of sacrifice. And the biggest thing that changes is normally sacrifice tends to be in black.

Black is the one. So one of the things we tend to do is, I don't know if you've noticed this, is if white sacrifices itself, it tends to help the group. Where if black, so white is, I sacrifice myself, and by doing so, I help the group. And black is like, I sacrifice this other thing, and I help me, I help my planeswalker, I help somebody. But black is more often to sacrifice other things. Now sometimes, depending on we'll let black also sacrifice itself but usually it's like I sacrifice any creature and we allow it to be the creature it chooses.

Now recently, by the way, we made a change for those that are unaware, which is sometimes there are creatures that they sacrifice a creature to get a bonus, and the bonus is to themselves. A real classic one we'll do is like Vampire Hound, which is discard a card, the creature gets plus two

plus two. And for the longest time, you could just sacrifice Vampire Hounds. But it was causing some problems. I mean, whenever we... I mean, there's a bunch of different issues. And we finally said, well, it doesn't make any sense that you're sacrificing a creature

if the bonus isn't going to happen. Why would a creature sacrifice itself to give itself a bonus? Now, I understand the sneaky people love that there's times when it's the correct thing to sacrifice itself. But it was causing some confusion. I think there was some magic online issues. And anyway, it was definitely something where we made the conscious choice to go, look, it makes more flavor. It can get advantage from sacrificing itself,

meaning it generates a spell effect. Okay. Maybe it's the last step for it to sacrifice itself. But if it's sacrificing to improve itself, well, you can't just sacrifice itself to sacrifice itself. But anyway, in a set that's about the graveyard, we will up the amount of sacrifice stuff that we do. Sorry, not sacrifice the graveyard, we will up the amount of sacrifice stuff that we do.

Sorry, not sacrifice. Well, we will up sacrifice. We will up the amount of discard that we do. And we will let colors other than black do discard. Black usually... I just realized I said sacrifice when I meant discard. So, black is a color that sacrifices itself. It's also the color that discards the most.

I just realized I messed that up. But one take podcast means I keep rolling with the punches. Black is the number one card to discard for cost. That's a very black thing to do. And the reason is, is black is the one that's like, I'll do what I need to do, whatever the cost, I'll take it. Black is king of kind of hurt itself costs. You know, I'll sacrifice a creature. I'll discard a card. I'll do what I need to do, whatever the cost, I'll take it. Black is king of kind of hurt itself costs. I'll sacrifice a creature. I'll discard a card. I'll pay a life.

Black is willing to pay the cost to get what it wants. Now, other colors, we tend to do less of discarding as a cost. We do a little bit, but in a graveyard set, where we're trying to enable the graveyard, we will up that. And like I said, there are different sets that we use discarding if there's some point to what's going on. Like, Mercadian Mass famously used it for spell shapers, in which it wasn't so much discarding as the flavor was.

It was transforming one of your spells into another spell. But the functional thing is it discarded the spell. Finally, we get to the zone that gets the most attraction in a Graveyard Matters set, which is Library to Graveyard. And this is where we get milling.

Now, be aware, there's actually two different ways to get stuff to the graveyard. One is milling, which is straight off top of Library, directly into the graveyard. And the second is more pinpoint, where I choose what top of the library directly into the graveyard. And the second is more pinpoint, where I choose what I get and put that in my graveyard. Sometimes it's like where I get multiple cards, my opponent chooses, and other stuff goes in the graveyard.

Oh, the other interesting thing, by the way, is it's actually not just milling. So graveyard to play, there's a couple ways to do it. One is straight up milling. The other sneaky way to do it. One is straight up milling. The other sneaky way to do it is stuff like mulch or like card filtering, like impulse or something. Does impulse go to the graveyard? Well, cards.

So, for example, green a lot of times will look at the top number of cards and get a land or get a creature and then dump the rest in the graveyard. Or blue will loot. It will take a card and discard a card. Or sometimes it will look at so many cards, take one and throw the rest away. Those cards are ways to get cards in the graveyard. They're a little subtler because it's, because when you say put cards in the graveyard, well, that's the focus. And here's the interesting thing to think about, which is when you design a card, if the card only does one thing, that's the focus. So if I say mill four cards, that's a million cards, what it does. If I say mulch, look at the top five cards and take any land you see and throw the rest away or top four cards for mulch.

Then what happens is people, when it's a side effect, people don't focus on it. So it's funny because R&D loves to do this, designers love to do this, which is when we're doing a graveyard set, we fill the set with stuff like mulch and things where we want you to have, you know, we want you to sort of enable yourself for the graveyard. And so what we do is we find effects that kind of get stuff in the graveyard as a byproduct

rather than as the focus. Now, we still do the focus. We still do milling. The other thing that we do, so that's on top of the library. And if we still do the focus. We still do milling. The other thing that we do, that's on top of the library. And if we don't have a library, sometimes, there's sometimes stuff like in Tomb, which is just go get something, put it in the graveyard, which was

in Odyssey, by the way. I'll talk about that card when I get to my, next time I'm going to do card-by-card stories. I'm sure I'll talk in Tomb, because it's a good story. So, sometimes, you're just pinpoint putting stuff in. Sometimes like, uh, you know, mulching, uh, you're looking at sort of like, oh, I got factor fiction is a good example where like I get some number of the cards, but the rest is, well, I gotta do something with them.

I will throw them in the graveyard. And so sometimes, uh, a factor fiction is off the top of library. Man, today, my examples, I'm not as focused as I could be. A better example would be Gifts Ungiven, where you go in the library and pick out some number of cards, and your opponent chooses some, and some go in the hand, and some go in the graveyard. And so that, you know, and one of the things about Gifts Ungiven is that a lot of times the way you make the card have extra value is there's things that have value in the graveyard, so your opponent has a tough choice.

So, that is, so if you're doing a graveyard set, you want to focus on more ways to get cards in the graveyard. So if you're doing a graveyard set, you want to focus on more ways to get cards in the graveyard. So the byproduct of this is you do more spells like mulch and looting and stuff like that. But you also are drawn to things like milling. So if you will notice, most of the sets that had a graveyard theme had a milling component. And the reason for that is milling fills up your graveyard in a way that's pretty neat. It also has this fun thing where normally if I'm going to mill, I want to mill my opponent. But in a graveyard set, I actually have a decision to maybe mill myself. And a lot of times, milling yourself is the correct answer. And there's something kind of satisfying about taking something that has one general usage and giving a different usage for it.

So one of the things that happened was we said, oh, we want to do more milling. So we made milling kind of a sub-theme. And then we came across the idea of restocking. And so restocking is reverse milling, which is I take some number of cards from my opponent's graveyard and I put it on the bottom of the library. And the idea with Restocking was that was going to be sort of anti-milling, and sort of some graveyard stuff, because we were going to give you advantage in your graveyard,

stuff like flashback, and that this might give you some means to fight that stuff. And so, milling was based in blue, there might have been a little bit of black, Restocking was based in green because that's the color that naturally will put stuff back in the library the most and I think white

there's a little bit in white and so one of the things we started doing was we started making this web of network of oh there's land to graveyard stuff and oh there's hand to land stuff and oh there's graveyard to library and library to graveyard and that and oh, there's hand to land stuff, and oh, there's graveyard to library, library to graveyard.

And we just made this really intricate web. And it's funny because one of the things that happens, especially back then, was I would just take every possible idea and just run with it. And so by the time I turned the set over, it was the most intricate, elaborate web you've ever seen. And one of the things that Randy said when he was doing development is, he goes,

Mark, you have a lot of good ideas. In fact, too many good ideas. Some of your good ideas are going to have to go. And he figured out what was most integral to what was going on and he pulled a lot of other stuff. Okay, so that was me talking about designing for magic

as a graveyard as zone changing. as a graveyard as a zone changing. Next is graveyard as a resource. So the first big graveyard resource, obviously, was Flashback, because, I mean, that is an inherent graveyard. We also wanted to make sure that there were some cards that could get back from the graveyard. We wanted to make sure that there were some cards that had some impacts in the graveyard. And in fact, by the way, let me talk about this. So we knew that we wanted cards

that were what we call active in the graveyard, which means if you look at the graveyard, this card wanted to say to you, hey, hey, I'm in the graveyard. This is important. You can use me. And so we came up with having a little icon, which was a little tombstone icon.

It was on the car type line. And the idea was, we were trying to do something, and if you looked in your graveyard, you could see this. Now, there are a couple problems with this. The biggest is it just wasn't that noticeable. I mean, I guess if you were looking for it, you could see it. But nowadays, we would probably, like we did with...

We're much more willing to use frame changes, like Bestow in Theros. We wanted to make sure that you could differentiate this creature that was an aura from a normal aura, so you understood that if I block this creature and kill it, oh, he's going to get a creature. And we are much more willing to use frame treatments

than we used to be, and so I think, like, nowadays, if we were going more willing to use frame treatments than we used to be, and so I think, like, nowadays, if we were going to do something like that again, it wouldn't just be a tombstone, it'd be a frame treatment. Okay, so, oh, the other big question people have is, you guys used a tombstone in Odyssey, and then the tombstone disappeared. What happened? So the plan actually was that we were going to use the tombstone from then on. It was going to become part of magic, that if you were functional in the graveyard, you were going to get a tombstone. But then the very next year, we did a card redesign. Mirrodin was the first set with a new card, or 8th edition was the first set, and then Mirrodin was the first block. So right after Odyssey ended, we did new card

frames. And the problem was that the tombstone didn't fit at the time in the new card frames. And so we had this dilemma. We're like, well, what do we do? And we decided, well, we just introduced it in Odyssey block. It could just be an Odyssey block thing,

and just let it drop. And a lot of people were very curious, like, what happened to the graveyard or to the icon or to the tombstone? Anyway, the answer was the frame change. I think now we have the technology that we could do it, although, once again, now I think we'd use frame change

and not just the little icon. But for those that are wondering what happened to the little tombstone icon, the questions are answered. So there's a bunch of different ways to make use of Graveyard as a resource. Flashback for us

was the biggest thing. And we had a few other cards that had some function in the Graveyard. You know, as the block went along, they play in different ways. We get to Judgment

and to... Judgment and to... Not... Tor We get to judgment and to... Judgment and to... Torment. Torment and to judgment. So I'll try to think of any other... I mean, the key thing about... Something we've learned about the graveyard as a resource is...

I talk a lot about card advantage. And so one of the things about turning card advantage on its ear was it wasn't that Odyssey actually got rid of card advantage. It didn't. What it did is it said cards in your graveyard can also have value as a resource. So what we said is in this set, card advantage isn't limited to the hand and the battlefield. Because I think a lot of

card advantage theory was based around the idea of, well, I have cards in my hand and cards in play on the battlefield, and that once things went to the graveyard, well, you've lost them. But in this set, one of the things that's interesting is, like, if I discard a card with flashback, well, I haven't

actually, I mean, I've lost some utility with a card, but I haven't completely lost a card. Or even better, if I mill a card and get a flashback card, I've essentially drawn a card. Now, I've drawn half a card, because I only get a flashback at once, but still, one of the things that the graveyardist resource did is it said, oh, well, while you're milling yourself, you can be getting advantage, you can be getting card advantage, and that it allowed us to put card advantage into the graveyard. And that became very potent. Very potent. Yeah, I talked about last time that one of the things that's interesting about Odyssey is that it had this public perception of being weak when in fact it's actually pretty strong. And the reason it was pretty strong, let's see if

I've explained this theory, is one of the things that I like to do is I like to sort of turn things on their ear and just kind of do things we haven't done before. And so one of the things I found is statistically in my sets, at least in the old days, the development team's gotten a little better, is that I would do stuff and people wouldn't quite understand it completely. people wouldn't quite understand it completely. And, you know, my sets tended to be a little more pushed, only because I was just messing around an area that we didn't quite understand as well. I was more likely to do that. And so I more often got some cards, like Future Sight's perfect example,

where I just made a whole bunch of really weird cards. And, I mean, some of them, some of the development was very clear were good cards, and some of them they pushed on purpose. I mean, Tarmogoyf was definitely pushed. But other cards, some of them, some of the development was very clear were good cards, and some of them they pushed on purpose. I mean, Tarmogoyf was definitely pushed. But other cards, kind of like, they didn't quite realize quite how good it is, I think. I think, like, Bridge from Below was something where they thought it had some utility, but it ended up being stronger than they realized. Anyway, so, one of the, it's interesting that Odyssey, you know, had this reputation for being weak, and the reality was it's pretty strong.

It's a pretty strong set. Okay, the third category to talk about is Graveyard as Barometer. And for this, I want to talk about two cycles that, I don't know, just have a lot of history and magic. The Kindle cycle and the Lurgoyf

cycle. So let's start with the Lurgoyf cycle, because the Lurgoyf cycle actually has an earlier precedent. So the card Lurgoyf cycle, because Lurgoyf cycle actually has an earlier precedent. So the card Lurgoyf was in Ice Age, and it had the wonderfully memorable flavor text, Akhan's run,

it's the Lurgoyf, last words of Safi Eriksdottir. So by the way, that card has generated all sorts of follow-ups. For example, in Time Spiral, we made Safi, Eric's daughter, as a legendary creature. In Unhinged, there's a card called Akhandrun that raises things from the dead. Oh, no, no, no. Well, I'm sorry, not raises from the dead.

It just gets creatures out of your deck that you can attack with. Anyway, Little Goif was this neat card that cared about the size of your graveyard. It was star, star, plus one. So in Odyssey, I wanted to have a cycle of Lurgois, which we ended up calling the Vores. The black one's Mordavor, but they all were... The idea was that they would each look for different things in your graveyard. We had black look for creatures, and green looked for land, and

I can't remember, was blue instants of red sorceries? Oh, no, no, no, red ended up being, no, red might have been sorceries. So we made the cycle, and one of the big fights at the time was Randy

really wanted to be Lurgoyce. And one of the problems with Lurgoyce is Lurgoyf was used in Ice Age because it is, it had a Nordic flavor, you know, the set had a Nordic flavor. So they were using words that were, you know, Northern European or Scandinavian. And Lurgoyf was one of those words. But the problem is, so it's spelled L-H-U-R-G-O-Y-F. And that is just hard to pronounce. In fact, one of the funny stories is, I remember when I was, I played in the Ice Age pre-release, which I will tell that story one day.

There was one pre-release, it was in Toronto. And I had a card, what was the name of the card? Where I would name a card, and if you revealed the card, then I got to draw a card. What was the name of it? Anyway, and I was, my opponent had this card called, had this card, Rogoit. And I knew the correct strategy was, I was trying to keep him from getting that card. And so, but I couldn't remember the name of it. So it's like that green creature that gets bigger

with the card in the graveyard. I just couldn't remember, you know. It was the first time I'd ever seen the card. And like, Lurgoyf does not stick in your brain. But anyway, Lurgoyf had gotten a fan following. People really liked Lurgoyf. And so, Randy wanted him to be Lurgois. I mean, we named him better.

We gave names that we could put in the course at. And I was in charge of the creature types. I mean, I was in charge of the creative. So I went back and forth. And in my heart of hearts, I knew that Lurgois was a bad, that people can't pronounce it. That's one of our goals is that people pronounce things. But there was enough love for Lurgois

and I feel like we could throw a bone to the Savage players, so I ended up saying okay, and we named him Lurgoyf. And then, obviously, Lurgoyf would go on to spawn. When I was trying to make a card for Future Sight, Tarmogoyf came from me trying to make a Lurgoyf variant. So, yeah, another Goyf, if you will. So, Kindle.

Kindle first showed up at Tempest. And Kindle was me... I think I might have told this story during the Tempest podcast. I was trying to make a Plague Rat lightning bolt, was the idea. I really like Plague Rats. And I was like, oh, wouldn't it be cool if you had this card that, like, you know, if you have one of them, it does so much damage, but two of them. And I finally figured out the cleanest way to do it was just look in the graveyard.

Like, the first time you cast it, it does two damage. The second time you cast it, it does three damage. But the nice thing about Kindles is it has this nice subtle varometer thing going on, which is if I mill cards that happen to mill a Kindle, well, now the Kindle in my hand does one extra damage. And so it was a neat—so I decided that I would do a cycle of Kindles, what we ended up calling the Bursts. I was very proud of that naming, because we were trying to name them.

And it's tricky, because, like, this one grants, you know, plus whatever, plus ever, and this one grants life, and this one, like, They're just such different effects. I tried to get the names to tie them together. I was actually pretty happy with managing to tie them together. And for extra fun, for some reason, we decided that the green one was going to have an extra bonus card. Diligent Farman.

In retrospect, I'm not quite sure why we did that. I think we were just messing with space that we hadn't done before. It's weird, though, because it becomes hard for us to reprint the birth cycle

because of diligent farming. But anyway, I mean, one day, if we do it, we'll rename it or something. And actually, to be honest, not all the effects

are what I would want to do if I was doing a new cycle, so I'd probably want to redo it anyway. But anyway, we did a Kindle cycle. We did a Lurgoy cycle. The stuff about the barometer that's nice is the graveyardist resource has card advantage issues that we've learned. So it's not that we don't do it.

Obviously, Innistrad was our last graveyardist. It had Flashback in it. We do do some graveyardist resource, but we have to be careful. One of the things, so one of the big questions that always comes about is people asking, why did Richard have a hand size?

Why seven cards? And the answer was, Richard was trying to limit how many decisions you had to make. You know, one of the things, for example, that Richard likes about the initial hand of seven is,

you draw seven cards, and some of them are land, and some of them are just expensive, and just the number of things you can do early in the game is limited. And Richard is very focused on managing the amount of choices the player has to make. And slowly ramping it up, eventually as the game goes on, there's more and more choices,

but you want to slowly introduce the choices. Much like in a video game, how in the early rounds you can't do everything. You get abilities that get added to you over time. And on the first screen, much like in a video game how in the early rounds you can't do everything you sort of you get abilities get added to you over time and that you know on the first screen

eh maybe you can jump and shoot but you know you don't get this special power up let's do this other thing to screen four screen six

or whatever and anyway I one of the things that I the lesson that I always keep in mind is trying to keep in mind sort of how much access to decisions you have to make. And so one of the problems with graveyard as a resource is it essentially raises the size of your hand.

Every time you mill a flashback card, you have another card in your hand, something else you have to recognize. You know, every time you mill something that has an effect on the graveyard, you kind of have another permanent. And a permanent is a little harder to deal with. And so it's not to say you can't do those, and we do,

but you've got to be careful. It's a little more dangerous. The other thing about a graveyard's barometer is it allows feeling of your graveyard to matter, but it puts the power and the spells in your hand, and those are something that we can cost for. And the reason is you know the graveyard is going to progress as the game progresses. It's going to start empty and it's going to fill up over time. And so we're allowed to make you care about the graveyard because we know early in the game when it's dangerous for you to be doing powerful things,

barring combo shenanigans in external formats, you can't fill your graveyard that fast. And so it's a nice check on the ability. And so that's one of the reasons we try hard to do that. So, anyway, so we went through and we found ways to optimize the graveyard in all three ways. We had, you know, more zone moving. We had more graveyard as resource.

We had more graveyard as barometer. And really, Odyssey explored them all. So, in fact, so one of the problems was, I was talking about this earlier, is we would find things and just go to town on them. And the problem was that there are so many strands

you can get from a graveyard set. So let me give you another just game design lesson. One of the things about game design, one of my ongoing motifs is one of the things about game design, one of my ongoing motifs is, one of the biggest problems I think game designers have, nah, game designers

have, one of the biggest problems, let me try that one more time, one of the biggest problems game designers have is that they, because they are gamers, and you have to be a gamer, I think, to be a good game designer, you have to understand the thing you're designing. You so badly want to see the act of game design as a game

that you prioritize challenging yourself as a game designer versus making the best game you can make. So let me clarify this. So what I mean by that is, in Odyssey, a good example, instead of focusing, instead of saying, okay, I have a graveyard set, where am I going to put my focus? What is the main thing I'm going to do? I just said, oh, look at all the things I can do. I can do this, I can do this, I can do this, I can do this. And I just did 8,000 things. And when I turned the set over, Randy rightfully said,

Randy was the developer, for those that don't remember. Holy moly, there's too much stuff going on here. And the thing to remember is, you, the designer, you are able to process things because you're the ones that are slowly adding things in. And you've worked on this game for months, maybe years, and that to you, each new addition came after you've carefully thought about the thing before it. But your new player, or just the

player that's for the first time seeing this, they encounter it all at once. It's not like they get the opportunity to slowly learn things. I mean, they do a little bit based on rarity. But in general, they have to experience it. And so if you put too much in, it's just overwhelming. And so, once

again, another ongoing theme, the goal of game design, like the goal of most art, is figure out how much you need to accomplish a task, and then stop. Anything more than what you need to accomplish your task is A, wasting resource, and

B, making it harder for the player to enjoy the things that you think are the focus. Figure out your focus, push your focus. You know? Now, that doesn't mean that you can't have other elements, and you should, but you have to be careful how many other elements. And Odyssey, to me, was this lesson of, I designed Odyssey too much for me and not enough for the audience.

Now, I already talked about in Lessons Learned how I was doing this intellectual experience that I found fascinating and turning card advantage on its ear and making you understand that there was card advantage in the graveyard. I was doing all this stuff that was horribly intellectually interesting to me, and to some high-end player, I'm sure it was interesting for them. But the problem is that I made players do stuff they didn't,

or the average player do stuff they didn't want to do. Hey, the correct play here is throw away your hand. I don't want to throw away my hand. I want to play my cards. You know? And so one of the things

that I was doing was I was making a set that I enjoyed more than they enjoyed. And once again, so another thing I was doing was I was doing was I was kind of satisfying my urge

to show what I was capable of. I'm a Johnny. I'm not just a Johnny in magic. I'm a Johnny in life. I like to show off. Got a big ego, in case you didn't notice. I like to say, hey, look what I did. That's my nature.

And so as a designer, I have to be careful that the point of a set is not to demonstrate what I can do. The point of a set is to maximize the play value for the players. And so what I want to do is I want to make a set that is the best set possible. And sort of what I've learned is, if I want to show off, show off how good a design I can do. Not how much I can do. Not what I've learned is, if I want to show off, show off how good a design I can do. Not how much I can do, not what I'm capable of, but

what work I can do when I fine-tune things. And Odyssey was definitely me saying, oh my god, there's so many we can do. Look at this, and look at this, and this zone change, and that zone change, and that early Odyssey, for art and design, it was just 8,000 balls in the air, and there just was so much hard stuff to track. So Randy, I mean, he curtailed a lot of stuff in. The restocking went away, and milling came down a bit.

And, I mean, there's a lot of different things that were going on that were playing into different zone resources. And so the thing I'm happy with is that, I mean, I still, I still believe Odyssey, at the end, at the end of the day, was too much something for me and not something for enough players. And that, I mean, it was very spiky, and I know there's some spikes that love it. I mean, it is a super, super spiky

set. And if you really do get off the fascination of understanding where the card advantage is, how to use it, and when do you throw away your hand, and that's interesting because you're supposed to throw away your hand. For some players, it's an awesome set. I mean, the design, my fault with the design is not that it doesn't do

interesting things, it just is a little too narrow in how it does them. And that my role is not just to intellectually stimulate, but to emotionally stimulate. In fact, that's one of my... I'll do a podcast on this one time. I believe that game designers spend too much time

on the intellectual stimulation of their players and not enough on the emotional stimulation of their players. One day I will do a big talk on this topic because it is one of my passions, is understanding the value of emotions in game design. I think that

it's very easy to understand how people will think about something, and harder to understand how they'll feel about something, but fun is not an intellectual, it's emotional. So if I'm trying to have my players have fun, I need to understand emotionally how it impacts them. Anyway, that's a whole other podcast.

So I'm at work. So what's going to happen is I'm going to have at least one more podcast where I'm going to go through cards and tell card stories. I've been trying to do that now in all my design podcasts. Really, my wrap-up today is I want to explain that I got together my team. I really explored all there was to explore in graveyards. I, in fact, explored a little too much and ended up having to help Randy pull

some out during development. But I do feel like it was a good lesson for me to learn from. I got to do a lot of exploratory stuff. I learned a lot about how graveyard works. I think one of the reasons that

I enjoy doing graveyard set is Odyssey was a great teaching lesson, and Magic has a lot of cool tools and do neat things in the graveyard. I've just learned you have to sort of pick and choose what you want to use where, and that the smorgasbord effect is not ideal. Anyway, like I said,

I look back at Odyssey as being a horrible, valuable teaching lesson, and that there's a lot that I learned from it. Also, as I look down at my phone, I had a lot of traffic today. Today is a long podcast. But luckily, I had a lot of stuff to say, so I think that is good. But I got to get to work because I got some work to do. So anyway, thank you very much for listening.

And it's time for me to be making magic.