Torment (Magic: The Gathering)

Torment is the second of three expansion sets in the Odyssey block of the collectible card game Magic: The Gathering, published by Wizards of the Coast and released on February 8, 2002, following the block's first set, Odyssey, and preceding its third set, Judgment. The Odyssey block introduced graveyard-focused gameplay mechanics, most notably flashback, which lets a player cast certain spells directly from their graveyard, and threshold, which grants bonus effects once a player has seven or more cards in their own graveyard, and Torment was built specifically to deepen those graveyard themes. The set contains one hundred forty-three cards, split into fifty-five commons, forty-four uncommons and forty-four rares, with no basic lands of its own since those had already been supplied by the earlier Odyssey set. Torment placed particular emphasis on the black color of Magic's mana system, contrasting with the following set, Judgment, which instead emphasized green and white. The block's storyline moved to a new setting on the continent of Otaria, following the barbarian protagonist Kamahl as he continued his search for the legendary artifact known as the Mirari, with Torment representing the darker middle chapter of that three-set narrative arc.