A lone dragonfly card is the only remnant of a past video game deal from 1997.
Back in 1997, Magic: the Gathering was riding high. Since being released first in 1993, the game now had a gigantic, and growing, following all over the world. And with such growth, came expansion into other areas.
One of these was video games. Now, Magic has had a long history of video games, some coming out, some not, and others just being made into a few test arcade cabinets then being forgotten about. And, in '97, Magic had a deal with a video game company. At first, the company thought the video game maker wanted ideas, but it soon became apparent that the video game maker had ideas of their own, and just wanted their own creatures and things on cards.
The first available expansion was Tempest, right in the middle of the Rath cycle. While the plane was a bit specific, Magic chanced it anyway and brought in some things that didn't really gel with what was going on. Then the video game deal fell through. By that point, the cards were already added. So, after some playtests, only one really remained in that they couldn't really take out at this point - Bayou Dragonfly.
Years later, Mark Rosewater would talk about this, saying:
"The request came during development. We were making some video game in conjunction with Magic and we wanted to have some overlap between our new set and the game. Fair enough, a little crossover can be a good thing. We offered to show the people making the video game the file for Tempest and said they could pick whatever they wanted to include in their game. No, that's not what they wanted. They already had the things they wanted in their game. They were interested in us taking things from them. Okay, we could try and make it work.
And these things already had names, so we needed to match the names. Now, remember that Tempest was set on the plane of Rath. It was a very stylized world, and it wasn't necessarily the kind of place where just anything would fit, but we were team players. I don't even remember what all the cards were—I think there were like six to eight—but one remains in my memory.
We had worked hard to fit all the cards in to make them feel as natural to Rath as we could, but Bayou Dragonfly stood out. There weren't really any bayous on Rath, but that was the name, so we had to work it in. We had freedom to design the card, but Bayou Dragonfly didn't give us much to go on. It kind of had to fly, as it was a dragonfly. I mean, "fly" was in its name. Now, green wasn't supposed to have fliers, but okay, we made an exception. I think we added swampwalk to try and make some sense of the word "Bayou."
Anyway, we took the square peg and jammed it into the round hole because we wanted to be cooperative. And then, literally the day after the file was sent off, the day after we had any ability to change the file, we heard from the video game company that the video game had been canceled."
To get a sense at how unliked the card was, it has remained unreprinted since Tempest, with a value of only a few pennies. However, Bayou Dragonfly has remained a cautionary tale at Wizards ever since, that you need to see through a deal first before you can think about cards. And that line of thinking has helped maintain steady set numbers throughout the current UB era. There hasn't been another Bayou Dragonfly.
To date, that is.
