Rise to new heights beyond the clouds and journey through the sky! Skybound Odyssey brings a lot of new features to Altered with six brand-new heroes and all-new game mechanics. Rediscover your favorite faction and build surprising synergies, but beware of the leviathans lurking nearby!

Marcus is an enthusiastic fan of all kinds of trading card games. Set Lead on Beyond the Gates, he brought his experience in designing simple yet interesting mechanics for Altered.

Nathanaël is an avid boardgamer, nitpicky rules lawyer and roleplaying game master. Enthusiastic about the lore of Altered, he’s very intent on making the cards of the set evocative of the narration.

Design on Skybound Odyssey started with one strong constant: this was the set that would introduce new heroes to the game. As designers, this was a really enticing prospect, but it came with a lot of pressure: expectations on new heroes are high, and these expectations can vary quite strongly from person to person.-

As early set design began, we quickly realized two things:

• It was essential that these new heroes offered strategies and ways of playing the game that were completely different from the 18 Beyond the Gates Heroes.

• As the first set of Altered’s second year, this set had to be accessible to encourage new players to join the expeditions, and overly complex heroes could be a large obstacle to this.

In other words, Skybound Odyssey’s heroes and mechanics are focused on creating new and interesting strategies, while remaining simple and focused on Altered’s core gameplay.

The choice for the theme of the set also followed the same principle. Following Trial by Frost’s snowy countrysides, and the mysteries of Whispers from the Maze’s underground, we decided that clear sky and floating islands would bring a strong sense of renewal. It was also important to choose a theme that was easily recognizable, and accessible throughout all the art and mechanics of the set.

Aerolith are a new type of neutral token: a Token Permanent Landmark. Token Permanent Landmarks are not played, but created in Landmarks by other cards. They are removed from the game if they leave the Landmarks zone.

Aerolith tokens have the following effects:
“When I’m sacrificed — Resupply.
{T}, {1}: Sacrifice me.”

The most obvious way to use the Aerolith is to pay {1} in order to gain a card in Reserve. But more often than not, you’ll look for a synergy with the rest of your deck. You can:

• fuel another card, such as Boom! (Rare, Axiom version), turning an expensive cost into an upside!
• use it as an inexpensive way to enable synergies requiring you to control one or several Landmark
• use it as a step towards what we call “Landmark overflow”, when your Landmarks zone is full, and every new Aerolith becomes a free Resupply for the next turn. Remember, during the Clean-up phase at the end of Night, the excess Landmarks you discard count as Sacrificed!

Gavroche is a simple and efficient source of Aerolith associated to a 1 mana Character, which is always powerful. At the very least, it allows you to resupply and delve deeper into your deck, but in a dedicated Isaree & Pebble deck, it becomes a very efficient card that can do so much more than its cost suggests.

To Rush means playing another card immediately. When a card instructs a player to Rush after they’ve already played a card, they do not start a new turn (and therefore cannot do a new Quick action between the two cards), nor can they choose to pass and end their Afternoon.

Rush is usually a downside: most often when it comes to playing your cards in Altered, later is better, because you’ve got more information. Most cards in Skybound Odyssey give you the option of accepting this downside in exchange for another ability.

The Harpooners assist the new Bravos hero Soledad, in her quest to hunt Halua, the Leviathan who blocks the expedition’s path. We wanted this card to reflect the feeling of the hunt with players. Strong and aggressive, playing Bravos Harpooner can overwhelm an opponent, but also opens yourself to retaliation.

A Terrain marker is placed in a visible region, removing all its previous Terrains and replacing it with Forest, Mountain or Water, depending on the marker.

• This effect persists until the Terrain marker is removed by another effect or overlaid by another Terrain marker.
• Passive abilities from cards that replace terrain types (such as The Kraken) apply “on top” of the Terrain marker, whether they come into play before or after it.

With Nadir & Bubbles we wanted to offer a new way of playing Lyra. Lyra Characters often have a strong statistic in one or two terrains, at the cost of a zero elsewhere. Terrain markers are a way to shore that weakness: if your opponent is in a single-terrain Water region, it doesn’t matter that you have a zero in Mountain.

Terrain markers offer a lot of strategic depth to Lyra players. They allow you to change a terrain's type by surprise to gain an advantage and complicate your opponent's progress. But in addition to this chaotic aspect that is true to Lyra, there's also a very interesting strategic side to it once you begin to analyze the stats of your Characters in hand, those of the Characters in your opponent's Reserve, and where your expeditions will be on the next turn. In true Altered fashion, a deep and tactical gameplay can emerge even with very simple Characters.

A common pattern in Altered is to overfocus on all the statistics needed to move forward, when you only need one. When creating Sea Nymph, we went back and forth between two patterns: focus on your own region (to match this first intuition) or the opposing Expedition’s (to guide new players towards a new way of thinking about the game). Since many Altered designs already encourage you to check your own Expedition, we decided to dig deeper into the design space that is unique to the set and to Nadir’s strategy.

A Woollyback is a 1/1/1 Character token with the Animal subtype. Unlike most tokens, it is generally created in an opponent’s Expedition.

(If an effect refers to a token’s owner, it’s always the player that created it. If an effect refers to a token’s controller, it’s the controller of the Expedition or Landmarks zone that token is in.)

Kauri & Puff, the new Muna Hero, is true to the reputation of Muna as kind and generous souls: he creates Woollyback tokens in the opponent’s Companion Expedition when you’re first player.

This is obviously a drawback, but it comes with a powerful upside: drawing a card every two turns. A good Kauri deck is therefore built around ways to mitigate the token you give to your opponent. With Skybound Odyssey, you’ll find plenty of ways to take advantage of this Woollyback with abilities that reward you when you face an expedition that already has a Character in it, or with spells that turn this downside into an upside!

In a 2vs2 game, you draw whenever you or your teammate play first, and always create the Woollyback in the Expedition facing your Companion Expedition.

Resentful Robin is one easy way in which you can turn the downside of creating a Woollyback into an advantage. With a Wollyback in the expedition facing it, your Robin will always get its boost! Resentful Robin is considerably stronger when you’re going second, as there’ll almost always be a Character that you can play it opposite to. This won’t be the case when you’re going first, however. Fortunately, Kauri and Puff’s Hero ability triggers when your side plays first, giving your opponent a Woollyback. The Robin’s stats are perfectly tailored to surpass the opponent’s Woollyback, giving you a way to gain a stat advantage combined with an ‘After you’ effect.

Ascended is a status that, unlike Anchored, Asleep, Boosted and Fleeting, applies to an Expedition and not its Characters. During Dusk, if an Ascended Expedition has a greater or equal statistic in a terrain of its region than the corresponding statistic of the Expedition facing it, it moves forward.

Note that a statistic of 0 is not sufficient to move forward, even for an Ascended Expedition.

At Rest, every Ascended Expedition loses Ascend. To signify that an Expedition Ascends, place a marker in it, you’ll remove it at Rest, at the same time you’ll remove its Characters.

The most satisfying way to use it? Play a Character with exactly the amount of stats needed to match the opposing Expedition, preventing its progression with typical Ordis efficiency without sacrificing your own.
Of course there are a lot of other ways to benefit from a dedicated Ascend deck: from effects that trigger “if I’m in an Ascended Expedition” to Zen & Zephyr’s second ability, which punishes your opponent if they give up on trying to block it.

Ascend was designed as a top-down mechanic, to fit the theme of aerial exploration and flying islands. As with all strategies based on a mechanic, you require cards that make your expeditions ascend (enablers) and cards that reward you for doing so (payoffs). During early testing, most of the enablers worked well, but the payoffs were often unreliable outside a dedicated Zen & Zephyr Ascend deck. Cards like Ascend Trooper were designed as a solution to this issue: the card is simultaneously a payoff and an enabler, and Ascend helps you move forward in all kinds of Ordis strategies.

Expensive Spells so far haven’t had much of a place in Altered’s gameplay, apart from a few niche scenarios. Big spells that affect the expeditions, such as removal or cards like Celebration Day, often have to be deployed early in the Day due to their mana costs, which makes it easy for opponents to adapt and play around them. Where cheap spells such as Magical Training, Beauty Sleep and Helping Hand have long dominated the metagame, we expect Moyo & Silk to bring the spotlight back on those powerful 4, 5, 6 and 7 mana Spells.

Our first version of Moyo checked the Hand Cost of the card played. This caused some cards such as the Rare version of Moth to a Flame to be overpowered. Building a Moyo deck was really challenging and it wasn’t uncommon for the player to have no playable card on the first Day.

Instead, Moyo checks the Base Cost of the card, which means the Hand Cost of Spells played from hand, and the Reserve Cost of Spells played from Reserve. This means a 2/4 card such as Off You Go! can be used to create a Moth the second time it’s played!

Defect is the flagship card for a new keyword, also named Defect. This ability does what it says on the tin: that Character joins your Expedition, betrays its faction and will help you move forward, blocking the progression of its previous friends.

A Character that defects leaves its current Expedition to join the Expedition facing it, changing controller.

This does not change the owner of the card, and if it would move to a personal zone such as the Reserve, Discard, the Mana zone or Hand of its controller, it returns to its owner’s corresponding zone instead. The new controller of a Character that defects cannot choose in which Expedition it goes—even a Gigantic Character card remains on the Hero/Companion side where it was played.