I think you've gotten a few wires crossed, as odyssey was freaking awesome, and landfall is kind of boring. There's next to no thought and skill involved in it's use. I'd rather make decisions that some focus group considers "unfun" than make no decisions at all.
Nice article, Maro! Unfortunately, I skipped from Masques Block (actually, pretty much the Mercadian Masques set) right to Onslaught, so I missed much of Urza (Urza came after Masques, right?) and Odyssey, so I couldn't relate to those stories. Having seen the Odyssey mechanics, though, I can definitely relate a little bit.
Personally, Landfall is a blast to play in Limited. I tend to play 16 land in my limited decks in most environments (I know the rule is 17, but I tend to feel something lacking when I play 17), but so far I've played 18, 17, and 19(!) land in my ZEN limited decks (the 18 and 17 were sealed, 19 was draft), although albeit 5 of those 19 were nonbasics and hence not really land (in the sense that land generally doesn't do much other than tap for mana).
The 3 times I've played ZEN limited so far, I've played G/r Landfall twice and R/B aggro once. I definitely think G/r Landfall is my favourite deck in this limited environment. The deck is a blast to play from both a Timmy and Johnny perspective, and it wins, so the (albeit very small) part of me that is Spike likes it too. I even found myself playing 17 land in R/B aggro, where my curve basically topped at 4 (aside from 1 copy of Geyser Glider and a kicked Burst Lightning).
From a landfall in limited perspective, I'd probably say the cards that were the greatest successes (imo) were:
Grazing Gladeheart
Harrow
Explorer's Scope
Oran-Rief Recluse
Frontier Guide
Timbermaw Larva
It should come as no surprise that all these cards are green or colorless.
I think you've gotten a few wires crossed, as odyssey was freaking awesome, and landfall is kind of boring. There's next to no thought and skill involved in it's use. I'd rather make decisions that some focus group considers "unfun" than make no decisions at all.
This post was bound to happen. :P
That said, I do think some cards in Odyssey were a bit convoluted, but the overall "chessiness" of the set appealed to me. The big problem was not the interactions between the cards so much as the wall of text on the individual cards themselves. Part of this is how poorly threshold got templated. Saying "if you have threshold, blah blah blah" invited the reminder text of what constituted "having threshold." It really should have just said "Threshold - If you have seven or more cards in your graveyard, blah blah blah" from the start.
To me, the biggest failure of Odyssey block, though, was the Torment/Judgment color bias. It promoted an interesting conflict between the two sets, but in the bigger picture, it was a bad idea. It threw the balance off in Standard for a couple years, which was quite the pain. I mean, seriously, Cephalid Snitch was way too narrow to be useful out of limited.
But I digress... back to Threshold's impact on Landfall. And this is where I agree with Itoh: I think Landfall overcompensated for Threshold's complexity. The pendulum swung a bit too far the other way. I wouldn't call Landfall boring, but it could have done a bit more. Then again, there's still two more sets in the block, and we can probably expect a bit more development on the ability.
I think Landfall overcompensated for Threshold's complexity. The pendulum swung a bit too far the other way. I wouldn't call Landfall boring, but it could have done a bit more. Then again, there's still two more sets in the block, and we can probably expect a bit more development on the ability.
This.
I've found Zendikar boring so far, but I have hopes that Worldwake will expand upon it enough to be interesting. Glad to see so many people don't share my opinion and keep Wizards in business.
I think you've gotten a few wires crossed, as odyssey was freaking awesome, and landfall is kind of boring. There's next to no thought and skill involved in it's use. I'd rather make decisions that some focus group considers "unfun" than make no decisions at all.
I actually agree about Landfall, but i was one of the people who was simply not interested in the direction Odyssey took Magic. It didn't have to do with being "unfun" in any grand sense, I just didn't want to do it. It wasn't fun for me, but not because playing around between zones in weird ways isn't fun. It wasn't fun to me because it was shoved down my throat. I don't like that sort of constriction, although it probably would have been cool in sealed.
Of course, I am not so sure that's a good reason for an all-upside mechanic that rewards you simply for playing Magic. This is not too surprising given the most recent sets and their focus on making cards that don't make people feel bad. Heck, I am designing an entire set based on cards that make people feel bad.
I do think Landfall is fun. What I have a problem with this that, apart from landfall, there's not a whole lot of interesting things to do in draft. I started playing in Mirrodin, and so far I think my favorite draft format was Time Spiral. I'm a Johnny-Spike-Timmy (Johnny primary, Spike/Timmy pretty much equal). I'm annoyed by draft formats that have few strategies to choose from because most games end up playing the same. Time Spiral had a huge number of strategies and clever combos you could pull off at common, but I felt that each of them was simple enough that keeping track of everything didn't strain the brain too much.
Shadowmoore and Zendikar are sets I was initially excited about, but later found I didn't care as much about. Shadowmoore broke all kinds of rules in fun ways, but ultimately none of them encouraged you to make particularly interesting decks. I mean yeah, you needed to care about colors to beef up your creatures but I never felt like I was doing anything other than playing the best cards I could. I eventually learned that the only strategy I actually enjoyed was messing around with -1/-1 counters, and I often passed better cards for -1/-1 counter manipulation cards just so I could have more fun. It was a bad feeling that I had to do the same thing every draft, often at the expense of a good deck.
Landfall is fun - it encourages interesting tricks and deckbuilding. But it's the only thing I DO find particularly interesting about Zendikar deckbuilding. Traps are cool but there's not much that interacts with them to please Johnny. Allies might be interesting if I could ever draft enough of them but I can never get too many.
I didn't get to play as much Alara as I wanted, but I did get a sense that that was closer to what I like, because there were 5 different strategies that were each interesting, and each were present in three different colors, so there was a lot of deckbuilding versitility.
Hmm. I'm no super-huge fan of Odyssey either, but I don't think its sins were on the design side. Development bears a far greater bulk of the culpability there. Yes, people might not want to discard their hands... buut that's where Flashback (and later, Madness) will come in. Discarding and still getting to cast the spell is pretty neat from a Timmy perspective!
Anyway, the bigger problem with Odyssey (and Odyssey block in general) was that it notably amped up the power level compared to Invasion, but only in small subset of the cards. This was back when magicthegathering.com was hyping how only so much power could be put in a set (true) and that this meant that they'd intentionally make a lot of cards suck (what?). Thankfully it was Ravnica, I think, which changed this to "the difference between a really awful card and an average card for Constructed is minute, so let's have fewer awful cards." But seriously, look at Odyssey Rares. There are cool, flavorful rares that could have done more had the rest of the block not had its power jump (Lieutenant Kirtar, Master Apothecary) and... a lot of completely awful cards that were destined to go nowhere (Cursed Monstrosity, Hint of Insanity, Pedantic Learning). With the power increase thanks to cards like Wild Mongrel, even many of the decent, averageish cards went unused. This probably wasn't good for sales.
Also, while on the "snicker at old philosophies espoused on this site" note, I'll also add that I looked on in horror in around Time Spiral when it was being declared that every mechanic should be changed like Echo to something generic and modifiable, and that Threshold should have been written as "Threshold - (Number)." The situations usually weren't QUITE as complex as MaRo describes, I think, thanks to 7 being the magic number - once it was reached, it was reached, and often it would be obviously impossible to hit it. If Odyssey had had multiple Threshold numbers with some cards triggering at 3, 4, 7, 10, etc. cards in graveyard, that'd have been madness (har). Thank goodness that didn't happen.
Anyway, the bigger problem with Odyssey (and Odyssey block in general) was that it notably amped up the power level compared to Invasion, but only in small subset of the cards. This was back when magicthegathering.com was hyping how only so much power could be put in a set (true) and that this meant that they'd intentionally make a lot of cards suck (what?). Thankfully it was Ravnica, I think, which changed this to "the difference between a really awful card and an average card for Constructed is minute, so let's have fewer awful cards." But seriously, look at Odyssey Rares. There are cool, flavorful rares that could have done more had the rest of the block not had its power jump (Lieutenant Kirtar, Master Apothecary) and... a lot of completely awful cards that were destined to go nowhere (Cursed Monstrosity, Hint of Insanity, Pedantic Learning). With the power increase thanks to cards like Wild Mongrel, even many of the decent, averageish cards went unused. This probably wasn't good for sales.
I'll agree with this as my main problem with Odyssey. Invasion Block had just done a remarkably good job of making most cards relevant, and then Odyssey was chock-full of terrible cards like 5-cost counterspells (sure, you could flash it back for 7, but that didn't exactly help).
I don't mind complicated play situations, but I do mind when two-thirds of my Limited cardpool is terrible compared to the other third.
