A Compleat History of the Magic: the Gathering Metagame, Chapter 16: What if Card Advantage Doesn't Matter?
Last time, we had a brief look at the top deck of Masques/Invasion-era Standard. This chapter, we're moving forward into the release of Odyssey block.
There are many imps of the perverse in game design. One of them is the one that suggests taking the established strategic pillars of a game and turning them on their head. Almost every game, if it needs to eat up enough mechanical space, will encounter this impulse eventually.
In Fallen London, there's Hallowmas, the yearly festival where accumulating Menaces is good. In League of Legends, there's Bard, a support champion who wanders around the map like a pseudo-jungler instead of sticking to their lane partner.
In Magic, there's Odyssey block, which was explicitly designed to turn the logic of card advantage on its head.
Card advantage, if you need a reminder, is the principle that cards are are a resource; that your cards can trade for the opponent's cards; and therefore that it's good to have more cards than the opponent, and to exchange your cards for more of your opponent's cards in trades.
The great overarching joke of Odyssey, which translated from its Limited environment all the way up into Standard, was this: What if your cards rewarded you for 'wasting' your other cards? So much so that conventional ideas of card advantage went out the window?
Odyssey accomplished this through the use of four key mechanics:
- Cards with Threshold have an ability that gets better as long as you have seven or more cards in your graveyard.
- Cards with abilities that let you discard a card for some effect. The best ones of those didn't tap or use mana to activate, allowing you to simply dump your entire hand if you wanted to, quickly filling up the graveyard for threshold.
- Instants and sorceries with Flashback could be cast once again from the graveyard, often for a different cost from the original casting. In many cases in Odyssey block, the flashback cost was cheaper than the normal mana cost – incentivizing discarding the card then casting it from the graveyard.
- Cards with Madness could be cast as you discarded them, again for a different cost from their normal mana cost. Many madness costs in Odyssey block were in fact cheaper than the card's normal mana cost, thus making Madness a mechanic that actively rewarded you for discarding Madness cards out of your hand.
To understand strategy in Odyssey, then, one needed to make two mental leaps. One was understanding that if your cards were simply better than your opponent's, that was as good as having more cards. A lot of the best threshold cards were so far ahead of the curve when they were 'turned on' that it was worth throwing away your cards to enable threshold.
The other mental leap was understanding that a 'card' is a fluid and malleable concept. Flashback cards were essentially two cards in one – the 'main' casting and the 'back' casting from the graveyard. Therefore, discarding a Flashback card was like discarding half a card.
Of course, from this perspective of card quality mattering, discarding a Madness card is like gaining card advantage – because casting it for Madness is just better than casting it the normal way.
This block would prove a little divisive – some players were bewildered by the counterintuitive strategy; others fell in love with it. But the Standard environment that emerged out of Invasion and Odyssey blocks is widely regarded as a classic one where lots of different decks were viable. Some of them played in the topsy-turvy space of Threshold, while others didn't quite so much. But almost every archetype changed indelibly with the presence of Odyssey cards.
This deck had a limited amount of success – this list placed 20th at US nationals. But it was popular for a while in this format, and it's certainly the Odyssey-est deck here. The premise is simple: play cheap creatures and back them up with countermagic and Repulse. Casting cheap blue spells quickly fills up the graveyard; this is one of the earliest decks to run a one-mana blue cantrip to enable all sorts of spell synergies and 'thin out' a deck. Fact or Fiction appears here as a dual enabler – it refills the hand and, of course, dumps cards into the graveyard. The dream line of play is something like:
Turn 1 – Forest, Nimble Mongoose
Turn 2 – Island, Werebear
Turn 3 – Island, Opt, Memory Lapse something
Turn 4 – Forest, Fact or Fiction
Turn 5 – Repulse your creature. Oh look I have Threshold and you have no board – attack with my 4/4 and my 3/3.
This is also the first time we're meeting Upheaval, one of the all-time fake symmetric spells. Acting as a panic button should the deck fall behind, the trick with Upheaval is that you cast it very late in the game when, between lands and Werebears, you have eight or more mana. Then you use that extra mana to immediately recast a threat or a Werebear after the Upheaval; meanwhile your opponent actually gets sent back to turn 1. Of course, since it's late in the game, Threshold has turned Nimble Mongoose into a killer.
This list is 'the' iconic Odyssey Standard deck. Wildly popular at the regional and PTQ level due to being cheap – the core of the deck contains very few rares – Blue-Green Madness would become a beloved archetype, and its cards would become beloved classics.
Wild Mongrel is this deck's beating heart, the key enabler of almost every other card here. Almost every spell here wants to be discarded – from Madness cards to the grossly undercosted flashback cost on Roar of the Wurm. That being the case, Wild Mongrel makes combat impossible for opponents; how do you block this thing when your opponent is happy to discard one, two, or even three cards to it? Its color-changing ability even lets it dodge a lot of the targeted black removal that existed at the time.
The other enabler here is Careful Study, a card that in a vacuum would be horribly unplayable. Normally, this sort of 'looting' effect on a spell would draw one more card than it discards, to replace the spell itself. Careful Study is just straight-up card disadvantage... unless the cards you discard with it all have Flashback or Madness. In which case it starts to look an awful lot like two-thirds of an Ancestral Recall.
This specific version of the deck, from Mike Long, is an anti-meta version that tries to fight off a specific, very powerful Black card.
Here it is: The actual villain of the format. Psychatog absolutely dominated the top tables of high-level tournaments towards the end of this Standard environment. This is the best Upheaval deck and the best control deck of this format – though, like all things Odyssey, it's also a novel twist on what a control deck can be. Usually, control decks aren't playing three-mana creatures designed to rapidly and brutally end the game.
Against any deck that can't interact with Psychatog – which is any deck without blue or non-red creature removal – this deck has the option of just slamming Psychatog on turn 3, at which point it presents a catastrophic threat and a powerful card advantage engine. Deep Analysis is truly priced to move; it's okay as four cards for six mana, but it's spectacular as two cards for two mana. Because of the velocity with which it draws cards, this deck truly demonstrates why cost reduction (as in Nightscape Familiar) is better than just a creature that taps for mana (as in Werebear). Over the course of one turn, a Nightscape Famliar can reduce the cost of spells over and over, in effect generating a lot more than one mana.
The final expansion of Odyssey block, Judgment, contained a cycle of five cards that would become instant classics; the Psychatog Deck makes great use of the blue one, Cunning Wish.
A point of rules clarification: In tournament play, 'a card you own from outside the game' means a card from your sideboard, not any old card you happen to have on your person.
The wishes enable whole new forms of deck construction. A sideboard can contain a 'wishboard' of one-of silver bullets, as in the Psychatog list. Combo decks can play three copies of a key combo piece and four copies of a Wish to get the fourth copy in the sideboard. Psychatog is the first truly successful 'toolbox deck' – a deck built around a tutor or wish effect that enables it to grab the best answer for a given situation.
Elsewhere in Magic
- Another standout card from this block is Cabal Coffers, which enabled mono-black control decks in Standard and Extended.
- Many cards in this block make squirrel tokens. Squirrels are a quirky pet creature type of Mark Rosewater's that would vanish from the game for many years after this. What did people do with their squirrel tokens? Tap them to Opposition.
- Odyssey is strange in many ways, but one major oddity are the creature types. It eschews' Magic's traditional creature types – elves, merfolk, and goblins. Instead, Odyssey had Insects, Cephalids (a race of malignant octopus people), and Dwarves. This will become important later.
Next Time
- Onslaught block arrives. It's a 'tribal' block focused on creature type synergies built around Magic's traditional creature types like elves, merfolk, and goblins.