Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1295: Eventide

Episode Date: November 21, 2025

In this podcast, I talk all about the design of the fourth set in the Lorwyn-Shadowmoor block, Eventide.

I'm pulling in my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time to have their drive to work. Okay, so one of my ongoing quests, 1,200-plus podcast in, is to do a podcast on every single released Magic Expansion. So right now I'm going through all the, what were standard release ones from the very beginning, or in the beginning they weren't standard release. But anyway, I'm up to Even Tide.

Even Tide is the small set that went with, Shadowmore. So before I jump into Even Tide, let me set this, how did we get here in the first place? Let me sort of really quickly talk through how Lorwyn, Shadowmore, Maxi Block, you know,

the two mini blocks together, how that all came about. Okay, so several years earlier, the Magic Brand team decided they wanted us to have a fourth Magic set. And we ended up doing Cold Snap. And it was this only of that third ice eight sets we found lost in a file cabinet or whatever um but it was very disconnected from

everything and we weren't super happy with it so i said to bill i go bill next time you want to do four sets in a year talk to me i will make it i'll structure it i'll make it so it so organic that it's part of the block that it's not this extra add-on so two years later bill comes back to me goes okay we're going to do four sets um so i thought about it and the idea that i really liked that i came to was what if instead of having a normal so at the time normal blocks were three sets they were one large set and two small sets what if i had a um what if we did a block that was four sets and it was two mini sets meaning a large set than a small set than a large set than a small set and the idea was that it would be one cohesive world but a world in something fundamentally changed about the

world and so the idea that we came to working with the creative team was it was a world where things were sunny and bright and the generally peaceful world. But then something happened, the Aurora, and it becomes a dark version of it. So the idea of light and dark, of light and shadow, made a lot of sense. We liked that a lot.

And we knew going into it, we had already tagged the year to be a new typal year. We had done typal and onslaught, but we were feeling like it was time for us to revisit. Enough time had gone by. Once we decided to do the two mini blocks, The idea that I really liked was each one of them should have the theme

that the other one supports, but it's not the theme. So the idea is Lorwin's all about typal. The Shadowmore would have the creature types that were in Loran. So you have more cards to add to your decks, but it's not about typal themes. So we needed to come up with a theme for Shadowmore that is something that Lorwyn would have,

but would not be focused on. Which gets us to hybrid. So hybrid was something I, I had created during Ravnica. I was experimenting with kind of what exactly, what does it mean to be multicolored and stuff like that? I came up the idea of ore rather than and, and I ended up putting them in Ravnika.

But they ended up, when you first get a mechanic, there's two ways to use a mechanic. There's what we call splash and what we call sort of workhorse. Splash means it's just there to go, ooh, look at this new thing. And workhorse is more like, it's more structural. It's more about it's doing something important. And so usually when we do something really out of the box, we start by doing the splash version.

So in Ravnikah, they did a cycle of vertical cycles. A vertical cycle means it's common, rare, and either rare mythic rare, at the time there wasn't mythic rare. So it's common, uncommon, it's common, uncommon, and rare. And so each guild, each of the ten guilds had a vertical cycle. So it was kind of a cycle of a cycle. So it was a 30-card master cycle. But it was pretty straightforward. We weren't really doing that much with it.

It wasn't used structurally at all. It was mostly done for Splash. Just be something new and different than we were doing. But I really thought that... I saw the functionality of hybrid. And so the question I asked, I liked the idea of what if Shadowmore was about color, much like...

Because color, like creature type, is something organic to cards. If you want to care about it, all cards have it. And so the idea is, much like Lauren would care about typo and Shadowmore would be those creature types. Shadowmore could care about color and Lauren would be those types. So the thing that I was fascinated by was how much hybrid could we, how much hybrid could it set have? In the end, I decided on 50% that it felt pretty splashy. And in retrospect, with, you know, 2020 in hindsight, it was too much.

I don't think hybrid design just wasn't robust enough I mean hybrid is all about the overlap of colors well there's only so much overlap you have of colors

I mean you can do a little bit inventing new things that no one's ever done but it was we I think we ended up making a number of high not a lot but a number of hybrid cards

that were more multi-collar cards than truly hybrid cards once again not a lot of handful you know single digits that are even what I would call breaks

but But we did push larger than we should. So one of the things I decided at the time when I was structured in the block is the idea that Shadowmore would do the even hybrid and Even Tide would do the Enemy hybrid. The idea was we were a little worried it was too much to do all in one set, but we wanted to have access to it all. And there's only so much design space.

So by doing the enemy, it opened up design space. Now having one set be ally and one be enemy, at the time, a lot of what we were doing with the draft was trying to get you to draft monocolor. And I will say, Shadowmore, Shadowmore, Shadamore is one of my personal favorite dress. I love drafting monocolor. And it's one of the few environments where you just can draft monocolor. You don't have to get lucky.

Like, you can just do it. But at the time when we were making evening time, my thought process would be, well, hey, you're mostly kind of drafting monolour. So, you know, you can do things like, if I'm drafting mono black with black red and black blue hybrid cards, I can draft it with

black white and black green hybrid cards. As we will see, that actually proved to not quite be what we want, just because of the nature of how we did the color. I'll get to that. So anyway, it brings us to Even Tide. My first story of Even Tide, I know I repeat a lot of stories

on this podcast, part of having 1,200 podcasts, but here's the story I don't think I've ever told and it has to do with Even Tide. There's only one time in my history of being head designer, and this year is my, what is it, 22nd year of being head designer, in which I asked someone to lead the design of a set, and they turned me down. And not even turn me down. I'm not going to name the designer, but I asked the designer if they would lead the set. They said yes, and then a week before it went to design, they came to me and they said, I don't think I can do it.

and so what was going on in the time was R&D was really tight on designers a bunch of the people who had been designed had been sort of off to other things like Aaron, for example, Aaron Forsyth got promoted so there was a bunch of people I'd been leaning on to do designs had sort of moved off to other things I had just done the great designer search

meaning I was in fact trying to get more people because I know we needed it but they just started during Shadowmore so it was too early. They hadn't had enough experience yet to leave a set. Ken Nagel, for example, would eventually lead World Wake a year and so later, and then Alexis would lead dragons may. So, like, they both would end up leading sets, but it was a little bit too early.

And so I was pinched. So I was asking designers who had never led a vision, or at the time it was design, had never led a design before, but people who I had faith in who I thought were capable of doing it. So designer X, the person I asked was originally very excited but as they thought of it they started to have doubts that they could do it and so that's why they came to me and said

that's why they turned it down. I literally had no one else to do it so I ended up doing Even Tide the way it worked back then the Shadamore ended than Even Tide started so I just ended one and began the next there's a period of time where I literally went for like 10 years without ever

not leading a set like having a week where I wasn't leaving us at. But anyway, okay, so Even Tide's code name was donut. And the reason for that was Lorwyn Block was peanut, butter, and jelly. When we originally assigned the code names, we did not know it would be a fourth block. And we also, once we realized we were going to do four blocks, we didn't want to give away that it wasn't a three-set block. So we kept the names peanut, butter, and jelly.

and then we named even-tied donut. So it was peanut butter and a separate block, jelly donut, but they went together because peanut butter went together. It was 180 cards, 60 commons, 40, uncommon, 50 rars, which is a, oh, that's 150 cards. That's not 180 cards. 150 cards, 60, 40, and 50.

I led the design, along with Alexis Jansen, Ken Nagel, who had just got internships from the Great Designer Search, Jake Tice who was in the R&D at the time and Brian Tinsman and then the development was led by Matt Place along with Nate Heiss, Eric Lauer, Mike Turnion and then Ken Nagel was the overlap between design and development. So, because it was a small set,

this is the era of which small sets did get new mechanics. Early magic, we would do the large set would get two mechanics, and that's all you would see as far as named mechanics for the block. Eventually, as we evolved block design, we realized that people like seeing new things and new sets, and so we started adding mechanics. So even I did, in fact, have two brandy mechanics, which I will talk about.

But it also had the carryover of many of the major mechanics from Shadowmore. So, for example, it had both Persist and Wither. So Persist is a mechanic that says, when this creature dies, if it doesn't have a counter on it, it comes back to play, but with a minus one, minus one counter. Nate Heist had actually designed this mechanic for Lorwyn. Originally, the idea was, instead of having kill spells in Lauren, because it's a happier, friendlier place, we would have, instead, it would just put minus one, minus one counters on things.

So, like, I wouldn't kill you. I just would weaken you. But what happened was in actual play, it just felt meaner. It felt more cruel putting minus one, minus one counters. So we ended up moving minus one, minus one counters to Shadamore. So part of showing the mirror of the two sets was one set had plus and plus one counter with the lower wind mini block. And then one mini block, Shadamore had minus one minus one minus one to show the contrast between them.

And that was pretty cool. The other mechanic wither, also a minus one, minus one mechanic. It says that creatures deal their damage to other creatures in the form of minus one minus one counters. For fans of Infect, Infect, Infect, yeah, Infect actually borrowed from Wither. Infect was kind of Wither plus kind of poisonous. But anyway, Wither started here. So I like both persistent Wither. I think they're both good mechanics. I will say that R&D kind of soured to minus 1-1-1 counters. And the major reason is that plus 1-1 counters push you toward the game ending, right? creatures get bigger, they get more powerful, that it creates inertia for the game to end.

Minus 1, minus 1 does the difference. It shrinks creatures, it kills creatures, it lessens inertia. So in general, what we've found is it's just tricky to design with minus 1, minus encounters. That doesn't mean we'll never do it. I think it's the kind of thing that is just a high bar. So I do think we'll occasionally do them, but we've sort of learned that it's a special thing we should not do very often.

Oh, the other thing that was in the set, another meter that we did, this one created by Mark Gottlie, was the untapped symbol. So the idea of the tap symbol is if the creature is untapped, you have to pay the cost of tapping the card. Well, the untapped symbol is the opposite. If the creature is tapped, you can spend untapping as a cost to activate an ability. Two big problems with the untapped symbol, which you don't see it anymore. one is the way we made it is we literally did an inverse of the tap symbol graphically so everywhere where there is I think it's gray and black everywhere where there's gray it's black there's gray so like I think it's a gray background with a black arrow so on untapped it's a gray arrow with a black background I think is how it works and it's inverted so it's upside down so anyway it's opposite but if you're just a not really prepared for an untapped symbol, it kind of looks like a tap symbol. I mean, if you compare them next to each other, it's inverted and upside down. But if you don't, you're just kind

of glancing and not really paying attention, it looks like a tap symbol. So people constantly confuse them for tap symbols. The other problem with the untapped symbol was, it is just very hard to grok, meaning the idea that I have a card and I want to use it once per turn, and if I use it, I tap it to show I use it. Makes a lot of sense. Very intuitive. It's why I Richard included in the game. It's a very intuitive mechanic. The idea that when my thing is tapped, that I can use untapping as a cost is just really weird. And the number of times that people would attack into a creature with an untapped cost, meaning they could untap it to block the creature was super high. It was just very hard to sort of wrap your brain around it. It did not work in a way

that sort of made intuitive sense. And so, anyway, the untapped symbol did not. work really well. People both confused it for the tap symbol and it was hard for them to sort of understand. I mean, not that they didn't get the general concept of it, but trying to strategically understand it and read the board state with it proved to be really hard. Okay, so all that stuff, and another major theme that we carried over from the first set is color matter. That was a major theme. The idea that, oh, well, one of the cool things about hybrid is, while it is, you can only need one of the colors to play it, the permanent in play actually acts as both colors. A little, another little side note for this background. When we originally met hybrid,

and by we, I guess, when I originally made hybrid, one of the early versions of hybrid we tried was the idea that if I have a white blue card, if I use white manatea cast it, it's white. If I use blue manateaicast it, it's blue, meaning it is the thing. thing that you cast it as. What we ended up realizing was it just created memory issues that weren't worth it. The idea of being like, okay, now I got to remember, did I pay white or did I pay

blue? So we decided early on that it just wasn't worth the tracking. That's why it's two colors. It's not two colors because fundamentally that's key or core to the mechanic. It just was the easiest way without extra words and extra memory issues to do it. And like I said, that's why

anyway, a little side note of a hybrid. So, we had color matters, we had hybrid, we had Persist, we had Wither, we had the untapped symbol, we cared about untapping, all that carried over. But there were, in fact, two brand new mechanics in the set. Let me walk through them. So it was Chroma and Retrace. So we'll start with Chroma.

So Chroma was a mechanic. Basically what Chroma said is, I'm going to tell you where to look. Maybe it's on the battlefield. maybe it's in your hand, maybe it's in your graveyard, and you are going to count the number of colored manned symbols in that zone, and then we're going to care about that. That's going to mean something. There'll be a scalable ability that cares about that number.

We didn't do any thresholds. That would later come when we did devotion. So the story behind Chroma is Aaron Forsyth, we originally hired Aaron Forsyth to be the editor-in-chief of the website. I was putting together I'd been tasked with making a magic website Wizards of the Coast had a web page but Magic didn't really have much presence

and so the brand team decided they wanted Magic to have a page they assigned Bill Rose at the time was the head designer to do it he assigned it to me I was the one with the writing background and the communications background so I put together the original magic website

daily MTG. I needed an editor-in-chief I narrowed down to three people I thought could do the job I talked to all three of them two of them were not interested in doing the job but one of them Aaron Forsyth was

and it took a little while to get Aaron hired but I did and so Aaron actually joined Fifth Dawn because I thought it'd be interesting to have an article about what it's like to be on a design team so I put Aaron on the design team

so he could write that article and I thought to be I think Aaron would enjoy being on the design team It was interesting to see what Aaron could do. Aaron excelled. Aaron made most of the mechanics that were in that set. He did a great, great job. He did such a good job.

We ended up hiring him into R&D. One of the things he did in Fifth Dawn design is he gave me a card called Little White Butterflies. So Little White Butterflies said, you can reveal any number of cards from your hand, and for each white man a symbol that you reveal, you may make a 1-1 white butterfly, a little 1-1 that flies.

I liked the design so much What I said to Aaron was This is not a single card design This is a mechanic And we've got to save this This is an awesome idea I was really, really fond of it So when I made a future site

We ended up a card called Phosphorate Phosphorant Feast Which was I think you looked in the graveyard For green manor symbols And you gain life I think graveyard of our hand Anyway

We hinted that one day We'd make this mechanic We didn't name it in FutureSight. It just was on the card. We decided that we were going to do an even tide. We ended up calling it Chroma. Chroma is Latin for color. Not the most descriptive of names I give you.

And we ended up making it. I had really, really high hopes. I thought counting manual symbols was super fun. And it came out, and the response to the audience was, eh. Which really shocked me. It was probably the mechanics that had the highest hopes for that had the least uneventful landing.

ever. Now, regular listeners know the story. I've told the story, but important to now. What basically happened was, we just executed on chroma poorly. We would later, in original Theros, bring it back, but redo it. The two big changes we made to it. One is we gave a better flavor. Chroma doesn't really, I mean, it means color, but it's a pretty generic word. We changed it to devotion, which is much more impactful. And the other problem, or there's three problems. So problem number one is the name wasn't great. Problem number two was, we had you looking everywhere, meaning look in your hand, look in the graveyard, look on the battlefield,

that because the cards were scattered, you didn't want to play them together. So when we did devotion, we said, we're just going to look on the battlefield. That's the most interesting place anyway. And then all of a sudden, the cards start working together. Now you want to make a devotion deck. It's a cohesive theme. And the third thing is, I just don't think we push the mechanic at all, meaning we just didn't make a lot of cards that were constructed.

We made devotion, we did. There were devotion decks and stuff. So for those three reasons, and Chroma went on to be the poster child of the mechanic we executed on poorly. Meaning, it's a neat idea. When we did it correctly as devotion, people actually adored it.

Very popular mechanic. So my gut sense was right. It wasn't a very popular thing, but we executed on wrong. And that's what me, my set, executed on the wrong. That would be a theme for, today of executing things a little bit wrong.

Okay, the other mechanic was called Retrace. The way Retrace were is it went on instances and sorceries and then you could discard a land card from your hand to copy the effect if this card was in your graveyard.

The way I conceptually thought of it is if this card is in your graveyard, you could turn a land in your hand into a copy of that spell. That's how I thought of it. Not technically how it worked, but it's how I groped. And originally, by the way, I was going to have it be any non-land. And then Eric Loward convinced me that land was more fun,

that in the late game you don't have things to do with your land. And so land was a more dynamic version of the mechanic. I'm not sure Eric wasn't wrong. It did make more late game play and such. The biggest problem with retrace, with 2020 hindsight, is one of the issues, you know, when Richard Garfield made magic, he had you shuffle the deck. Why? Because randomization is pretty important. Variance is pretty important.

That one of the neat things about magic is games play out differently. That even if you have the same deck, from game to game, it's not exactly the same. And you'll notice, as you get more casual, like in commander formats, you start to have larger deck sizes with less repeating of cards, meaning you're trying to increase the variance of the play, because variance is fun. We need to be really careful. Retrace is one of those mechanics that just reduces variance. that once I get out this card

and I cast the spell, I'm just going to constantly cast the spell for the rest of the game. And so I think my biggest issue with the trace is it's just not an organic, fun play style. And so, anyway, okay, so that was the new mechanics. New mechanics were chroma and persist.

Not persist, chroma and retraced. Okay, so we make the set. It comes out. It didn't do all that well So I, including Aetherdrift, which is the last that I led that is out I have some more stuff coming next year,

but not out yet. I have led 41 released magic expansions. Actually, done another five that haven't been released yet. But anyway, I've done 41 release expansions. Of those 41 released expansions even died is clearly in my top five war sets. Not that there's not some good stuff in it, you know, figure destiny is a fun car,

I mean, there are some cool things in it. But looking back, a couple things. One is the idea of color matters and having two different sets that one is Allen, one is enemy, cause some problems. And the reason is, even though you can draft a mono-color deck

in Shadow-Shatter-Mashadamor, Shadamor, a lot of what is going on is there are color themes. So one of the neat things is I can have a mono-red card that cares about black cards. But I can play a minor red deck and still care about that

because there are black-red hybrids. As soon as I start having different sets care about different colors, it just makes it very hard for color matters to matter when you're doing any sort of... Because if you're doing a two-collar deck, now it's just splitting what the two-color decks are. And if you're doing a one-collar deck,

it's sort of, you know, most of the idea in color matters. There's some threshold, which works, I guess, but a lot of it is scaling, and that doesn't work. And so we set up something, which is, we set a model in which I don't think we can do it. And at the time, you drafted the second fact after the first pack, so we had to put our theme so high so they would matter in draft, but then it was just too strong. So even Ty just had a lot of things going to. I'm not even sure what the right thing is. I mean, really the right thing is correcting what's going on in Shadowmore, which is we have too high, a height.

in Shadamore, which means we also have too high a percentage in EvenTide. It's not that EvenTide being the enemy colors is wrong. I think we needed the design space, but I think I needed to lean on color more in a threshold way than in a scaling way. Scaling doesn't work between, we have two different sets that have different colors where you're trying to get as much as you can, scaling doesn't work. I generally like the idea of pushing Hybrid over them, but I needed to have a much more of a threshold system if I'm going to do Color Matters, meaning

I just need to have a black card not care about the number of black cards in my red deck and like I said I think with 2020 hindsight if we could lower the number of hybrid if we could change how we did color matters I think we could have a much more robust system I don't think it was unmakable

I just think and when I say we I this was my set I was both the lead designer of the set and the head designer at the time so this falls in my shoulders when I say even times one of my worst designs, it's on me. Nobody made it one of the worst designs.

And like I said, I think minus one-minus one counters had some challenges. I do like, I do think we made rather good minus-un minus one counter mechanics that I like. I think in general, like I said, I look back and there's things I like about Shadamore Block. I do like having high hybrid. We had too much, but I like that. I like color mattering. We don't do as much color mattering as we used to, mostly because we just...

Magic once upon a time had colored just more organic to the game protection and fear, and there are just more things that naturally mattered about what color things were. So when you change the color of things, it had a bigger impact. Nowadays, we don't... The problem with color as a theme

in normal magic, in every green magic, is if I care about what my opponent has, well, then either it's really good against them if they're playing one color and useless against them playing another collar. It's why we got rid of fear and intimidate. It's like, oh, you can't block me if you're playing a certain color deck, but it doesn't even matter if you're playing another color deck. That that created kind of bad variance in the sense that sometimes you're helpless against me

and sometimes, you know, my thing gives nothing against you. And we move to stuff like menace where, oh, there's something you can do about it. Blocking with two creatures, it's something you can actually make a choice to do rather than, oh, well, I can't, you know, I can't block with green things. things. My deck is green creatures. What can I do? So I think that looking back, I mean, we didn't actually hear on chroma correctly,

obviously. I mean, the fact that chroma became devotion and was amazing, meaning we really did not do it correctly. And the mechanic was, showed that it was way splashier than we did it with. So we messed there. I think retrace was just a lesson that we

had learned over time that we have to be careful with repetition of play mechanics. antics, tutoring, or things we keep doing the same thing over and over. Just in general, don't make for wonderful gameplay. So, it's interesting. I mean, one of the things about these things is I like to give some historical context when I go back and look at sets. And Even Tide definitely struggled.

It was, you know, oh, but the one thing I will say, here's the interesting thing. This is more about Shadow more than Even Tide specifically. but one of the interesting things about the whole experiment. So when we did this experiment, large, small, large small, we had never made a large set not in the fall. Shadamore was the first time we ever did that. And it sold like a large set, meaning we started to realize that one of the reasons,

I mean, we kind of knew this, but that we could do a large set not in the fall, and it would sell like a large set. It really was the very beginning of us sort of reshaping, like in some level, it was the, the slow, gradual decline of the small set that people just prefer large sets. We can make draft environments with them.

There were more cards. People got more excited. You can open up more packs and still see things you hadn't seen yet. And Shadamore Block, especially Shadamore itself, really was, like, taught us that. So even though there were some challenges,

like I, the other thing, by the way, is I really like Lorwin and Shadam... Sorry, Lorwyn and Shadamor is a world. The idea of a world of duality is really cool. So as much as I'm picking on elements of things that it didn't work, there were a lot of things that did work. I'm, for example, very excited that we're going back to Lorwyn. I think Lorwyn as a world is really cool.

I think there actually are some things from Lorwyn that we can salvage quite a bit. While I think that we did hybrid at the wrong percentages, I do think hybrid is going on to be a very useful mechanic, especially as a structural mechanic. I mean, it was splashing when you first saw, but I mean, really it's a structural mechanic, and now we use it all the time for structural things. very valuable. So I look back, I look back at Even Tide and, you know, it was,

uh, I, the interesting thing, actually, here's the interesting thing about Even Tide, looking back. Some decisions were made, mostly by me, but in Shadowmore, and Even Tide had to kind of live up to a lot of decisions that weren't Even Tide's decisions to make. They'd been made for Even Tide. A lot of what we did is we matched what went on in Shadowmore. And if Shadowmore made mistakes, well we made those mistakes as well and so that's one of the interesting things about small sets is that small sets

and blocks really got a lot of their guidance was set by the thing before them and so even if I'd have some problems some of it was we were following some patterns that I think were wrong some it was hey the new mechanics we executed on we didn't execute

on correctly so anyway I look back in some level there's some sets we really shine some sets where I think of them as learning experiences. Even Tide was a learning experience. I learned a lot from it. I'm not unhappy that I made it. There are some cool stuff in it.

Elements of it, you know, like, you know, devotion. Elements of it, you know, would go on to make some really amazing magic things. But it was not one of my best sets. I will just be open and honest about it. Oh, it came out in July 25th, 2008. I did not mention that. So anyway, guys, that is my podcast on Even Tide As I chug along and hit all the different sets

Anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed it, but I'm at work So we all know what that means. It means the end of my drive to work. So instead of talk, magic, it's time for me to be making magic. I'll see you all next time. Bye-bye.