Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1308: Lorwyn Eclipsed Vision Design

Episode Date: January 23, 2026

In this podcast, I talk all about the vision design for Lorwyn Eclipsed.

I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's another drive to work. Okay, so today is all about the vision design of Lorwyn Eclipsed. So let me first do a little setting up of the scene, how we got there. Many years ago, Bill Rose informed me. We had previously done during Ravnika block, we had done a fourth block. We had made a decision not to tie it into the block

and made what was called Cold Snap. I was never super happy with that. So I said to Bill, the next time you want to do a four-step block, talk to me, I'll integrate it. I'll make it part of the whole block. So Bill came to me, he said, okay, it's time.

And so what I came up with was, instead of doing large, small, small, small, like I said, we need to shake it up a little bit. I don't think we can, we have enough trouble with three sets in a block. So what if instead of doing one normal block, we did two mini blocks, each of which was a large set and then a small set. And the idea was it'd be set in the same world, but the world would go through some radical change such that the two mini blocks were connected but different. And that's when we came up with the idea of what if the world had some element of some natural occurrence that fundamentally changed what the world was.

And the low-hanging fruit we liked was light and dark. Lorwyn, the idea, had been tagged to be a typel set. And then we ended up coming up with the idea of making Shadowmore a color matter set with a high hybrid amount. So anyway, we did this. We had their four sets. There was Lorwyn, the large set, Morning tied to small set. Shadowmore the big set, even tied to small set. And we brought to the world Lorwyn and Shadowmore.

And it didn't go as well as well. as we had hoped. I think Lorwyn, for its time, is the worst selling large set ever in magic. It didn't get right. I think the only world that got rated lower in market research was Kamagawa. So anyway, it did very badly. And we have so many fun worlds,

and so we tend to go to worlds that didn't do so badly. So we really put off Lorwyn. But then people might blog, really, really been bugging us to go to Kamagawa. We decided we're going to do a new take on a Japanese set more influenced by pop culture than just mythology. And because I realized there was so much desire, at least from the franchise players,

I and a few other people convinced them to make it Kamagawa. And now it had, it was much time you're gone by. A whole element of the plane was the more modern plan, the more pop culture inspired. But it ended up creating this fun, you know, modern birth traditional sort of flavor. But anyway, we made Kamagawa, Neon Dynasty.

It went over really, really well. So well, in fact, that I'd been trying to go back to Lorwyn. I really wanted to go back to Lorwyn. The problem was, it just was a hard sell. That whenever you try to say, I want to go to this place

that didn't work the first time, people are like, well, are there sets we could go back to that did work the first time? You go, yes, they go, let's go back to those sets. But one of the things that I realized early on was that under the new model, like, it was a big ask to get back to Lorwyn and Shadowbor, right?

It was not a set that was an easy thing to Greenlight. So I'm like, okay, how do I do it in one set rather than in two sets? So at the end of the story of the Lorwyn story, Una, who's this fairy, sort of stops the Aurora, which is the thing that changes between the two. We don't really explain what that means. What does it mean with no Aurora? Well, the idea that I came up with was the idea of the idea of that. of what if instead of separating them,

like when the Aurora existed, the world was all, you know, it was either all Lorwin or all Shadowbor. What if they started merging? And the creative team like to use the marble cake analogy. Like, it's a marble cake

where some of the cake is vanilla and some of the cake is chocolate, you know. The only difference is ours is a swirling where imagine the marble cake that can change. But anyway, I like the idea of what if the world incorporate with each other.

Since we had made Lorenton, We had made double-faced cards in Innesrod. I'm like, oh, maybe we could show double-faced cards to show individual things changing. And anyway, I pitched this idea of sort of return to Lorwyn, but it's Lorwyn and Shadowmore mixed together. I think my initial pitch was the idea that there was conflict between Lorwyn and Shadamore. The idea being any one person and any one moment in time, like, I could be for a Lorwyn and on Lorwyn side until I step into Shadowmore. Now I'm for Shadamore side. So I think the pitch I had was the entertaining world,

but there was some, I thought the core conflict was going to be Lowerwyn versus Shadamore. Anyway, Kamagawa success. Well, two things. Once Kamagawa was successful, I got a lot more people saying, let's go back to other places. And the number one places people wanted was Lorwyn.

So much so, by the way, that we did a survey at one point through our market research, and we on it said, where would you like to return? and we listed a whole bunch of places, including Lorwyn and Shadamore. And I think it came in second. It did really, really well. So a lot of the anecdotal stuff that I'd be getting my blog, that survey, like, we're like, okay, Kamagawa did well. Okay, let's go back to Lower Room.

We got the thumbs up to go back to Lorraine. So when we started Lorwyn, I think the idea we originally started with, which is my concept of, Lorban v. Shadamor. So we started looking at a little bit like Mirren and Besiegeet. In fact, Mark Gottlieb led the design. The design team was led by Mark Gottlieb. It was him, Dan Musser, who did play design, Doug Beyer and Emily Tang, who did creative,

Eric Lauer and Jeremy Geith and me. And so early on, we were sort of looking kind of like we had done Mirren Be Siege, which Gottlieb had led, which handed off to Eric. Okay, what if there's a Shadamore portion on the set and a Lorwyn portion of the set? And early on it was like, what if half is Lorwyn and half is Shadamore? So one of the things we did is we went through all mechanics in the set, in all four Lorwyn block sets and said, okay, and I think we put them into three categories.

We put them into, we definitely, definitely have to do this. We could do this. We don't think we're going to do this. And the ones that were in the absolutely positively is there's no way to go back to Lorwyn and not do Typle. Typle was such like iconic to what Lorwin was. and there's no way we were doing typo and not do changeling. In fact, every time we do typo, we keep talking about, do we want changeling?

So it's hard not to do changeling in the place where changelings were created. And then for the Shadowmorph side, we're like, okay, well, we definitely have to do hybrid, although we do hybrid most sets these days. And we really wanted, we knew color matters had to be a thing. We did talk a lot about minus one, minus one counters. I think we technically put that in the maybe category. there are a bunch of mechanics who put in the maybe category

maybe evoke maybe champion maybe wither or persist if we use minus one minus one counters you know we had a and then we had a bunch of like conspire

and kinship and there are a bunch of mechanics that didn't really weren't that popular we're like okay we don't have a great need to revisit that

so eventually what happened at some point in vision is we realized that we were kind of missing. The cool part of Lorwin and Shadamore intermingling with each other wasn't that Lorwin could fight with Shadamore. Although thematic, there's some interesting story points there.

But the more interesting thing mechanically was that you could start mixing Lorwin and Shadamore together. Lorow and Shadamore each had a very distinct set of mechanical themes. It might be fun to start mixing those themes in a way that we just couldn't. You know, when you're in Lorwyn and Shadamore, oh, the other reason that I was really interested in mixing Lorwyn and Shadamore is,

When we first made Lorwynne Chathamore, there was nothing like Lorwyn, and there was nothing like Shadamore. They were very unique. But now, we have a lot more brighter, you know, we have Eldrain, we have Bloomberg, and the darker sets, you know, we've done inner-stros. We've done light and dark worlds that have a little more inherent to them. And the cool thing about Lorwyn and Shadamor was the duality. That was the most interesting thing about it. And so to just do one or just do the other, kind of missed, you miss the duality in the thing in which you don't see both sides. And that was really intriguing to us.

Okay, so once we realized that we could sort of do Lorwyn and Shadowmore and some combination of Lorwyn and Shadowmore, that really started driving where we wanted to go. And we talked to the creative team. Oh, so the development was run by Michael Majors, it was a set lead. Eric Lauer, Emily Tang, Jeremy Geis, Neil Laplant-Johnson, who ended up being the creative lead for the set. Ian Duke, Chris Kavartek, and Jules Robbins was the development, set design team.

So anyway, the idea was, let's sort of get sort of the best of both worlds. Originally, the idea when we were going to do one versus the other, we had the idea of five factions that were Lorwyn factions and five factions that were Shadamore factions.

In the end, what we ended up doing was, I mean, this is kind of a little bit different. We ended up leaning toward, there's five typal factions. They don't, early on we looked at maybe doing them as ally, but we realized that it sort of naturally fit what we wanted. We actually did five, we did a cycle in which all the colors represented twice.

What we ended up with is white, blue as Murphoke, black red is goblin, green white is Kithkin, blue, red is elemental, and black green is elves. We also, one of the things we realized as we sort of dug in more, that we leaned a little more toward Lorwyn than Shadowmore. It was called Lorwynne-Eclipsed. I mean, we didn't know that at the time. We knew we kept referring to as return to Lorwyn.

We knew that Lorwin probably would shine a little bit more. So the thing we tried in set design tried was what if the typal themes, the five typal themes, those archetypes are a little bit more prevalent. We expect people play them a little bit more than half. Normally we make a draft environment, we make 10 archetypes and we try to balance them pretty evenly. This time, we gave a little bit more weight to the typo archetypes and a little less weight to the other one. The idea was the low-hanging fruit of the typo strategies, if you're newer to draft, is what you're going to want to do anyway. But if you're more

experienced drafter, there are five other themes built in there. that you can discover. I think when we did the article that talked about draft, we didn't list all 10 of them, which is probably a mistake in retrospect. We just listed the typo ones. But the idea is there are 10 there. There's lots to discover.

If you enjoy drafting, we really wanted to make sure that... One of the problems with the original Lorowin was it was really on rails, and it was hard. Drafts were a little more alike each other than we liked. Like, if I played goblins, there are a lot of cards that only I,

the goblin player, are taking. and so the goblin, the gameplay of a goblin deck was a lot more the same from draft to draft. Not identical, but more similar. And the idea was we wanted to add more elements in to do that. So obviously, we knew we wanted to velourwin part of it to be typel-themed. We knew we were going to use changeling. That part was sort of, we most understood that part, and it's the thing that people clearly understood. then we have a lot of reps on. We've done a lot of typal things. It was the Shandamore side that

was a little more what exactly did we want to do. So first, let me talk minus one minus one counters. We did minus one minus one. I mean, early magic did whatever. I think the first set that uses minus one counters as like a block theme was I think Scars and Myridden, which was the return of the phrexians. And we were using it to show like the spreading of the disease. That is where persist and whither originally came from. And we then used minus one minus one counters again during Amicamp block, trying to show how severe the world was. Between those two blocks, R&D kind of said,

eh, they weren't very fond of minus one, minus one counter. Structurally, the problem with them is you want the game to end. So you need to have inertia making the game end. Plus one plusercunders are great. Things grow, they get bigger, they get more powerful. They increase the inertia of the game. minus one minus ones tend to shrink creatures they make them weaker

they make attacking less likely and what happens is it tends to slow the game down it sort of fights inertia and so one of the big worries is that R&D have kind of ridden off minus one minus one counters but we're like well but we're on

like they were so oh I'm sorry what am I saying minus one minus one encounters started sorry sorry sorry I'm mixing this off they started in Shadowmore That's where they started. We then also did them Scarves of Meriden,

but actually whither and persist are from Shadowmore. I'm confused myself. The way we used them in Scars of Mirrodin is what we did like, we did infect, we did proliferate and made use of stuff like that. But actually, sorry, the very first set that used minus one minus McConaugh as a broad theme was Shadowmore, which is why we really wanted to bring them back. We really wanted to So, originally the idea we played around with is

What if we combine minus one, minus one, plus one, plus one? What if Lorwin had plus one plus one counters And Shadamore had minus one minus one counters? But it didn't take long to play with them To realize what the whole reason we stopped doing Then the first place is When there's multiple counters that go in creature, especially one makes them grow and one makes them shrink,

it is very hard to tell what's going on. Oh, I have a 3-3 with a counter on it. Is that a 2-2? Is that a 4-4? Like, it's just, it makes the math so much harder to do of every single thing you have to like, okay, what is that again? And so we decided that minus one, minus one counters,

well, two things. One is, it's more different. We hadn't done them in a while. And it's more reminiscent of Shadowmore. Lorwyn had really loud typo themes. It was going to feel like Loran. We weren't really worried about that. But we had done, we started to do more hybrid.

So, yeah, we'll do some hybrid. But hybrid being in sets is not that obvious. these days, so hybrid didn't define it as much as we'd hoped. I mean, we do have hybrid there, obviously. So we played around with minus one, minus one counters. The mechanic we actually ended up, which came really early in design, vision design, was blight. And the idea of blight is pretty straightforward, is what if, as an additional cost, you could trade essentially power toughness of creatures, of your creatures.

like oh well in order to cast the spell after blight two well then that means my four four becomes a two two or maybe i killed my two two two Now, original blight, the way it worked originally was you could only put it on a creature whose toughness was equal or greater than the blight cost. We later got rid of that just because it wasn't worth the complexity. Like it used to me if I had blight too, I couldn't put it on a one-one. Or I think blight you could divide them as you wanted to. So I could put one of them on a one-one, but I couldn't put two on a one-one.

They changed that in set to that just because it wasn't worth the complication. Like, okay, my one-one could get two counters and die, and that was okay. So we really liked how blight worked and we liked the idea that just it was reminiscent of Shadamore so we ended up deciding to do minus one minus one counters. It is a very challenging thing and you'll notice in this set

we do let you blight on your opponent's creature so there's a little bit of that. The nice thing is normally they get to choose where it goes and there's a little there's a minus one minus one counters but we were trying to be more careful how we use them to sort of not get into the same environment

we were having trouble with in previous minus one environments. Okay. We also invented a new mechanic called Vivid. And what Vivid was is kind of like domain. Domains and mechanic first introduced an invasion, although not named there, where you had scalable effects that scaled off the number of basic land types you had. This is the same thing.

It just scales off the number of colors you have. So, interesting, vivid in vision design worked a lot like how party worked, which was each card could only add one to your count. So, for example, let's say I had a black creature and a red or green creature. I could count my black creature as black. I could count my red or green creature is either red or green. So my vivid count would be two. Eventually, kind of like Blight, what they figured out in set design was, it wasn't worth the complication.

And it was kind of fun to go, oh, I'm playing my hybrid guy to get the extra color. So now if I have a black creature and a red and green creature, I get black, red, and green. I get all the colors that my creatures represent. So, yeah, a five-color creature will give me a vivid of five. The other reason, Vivid is interesting, is that Vivid clearly felt shadow more in the sense that it's a color-matters mechanic, and color matters with shadow,

more, but something about counting colors had a much more of a bright aspect to it. Like we ended up calling mechanic vivid, which the optimistic tone of it felt like Lorwin. So we liked the idea that we had access to mix them, and there's a lot of fun stuff we were able to do because we can mix them back and forth. Okay. We also had a little bit of transforming. So one of the big questions, when I first pitched the idea of going back to Lorwyn, one of the things I was really excited by was double-face cards existed. Now, because if, remember,

the Aurora doesn't exist anymore. So something like night day doesn't make sense. It is not all day or all night. Once again, marble cake. Everything's mixed. So the idea that individual creatures can be lower when turned to the Shadamore side or vice versa was pretty cool. And so I think pretty early on, the idea was now that they changed universally, they change independently because in the world, things change independently now. And at one point, we were pretty high. We started pretty high in vision design. I think we were thinking of like, oh, what if it's like Inestrade?

What if like there's a slot in every pack? And what we eventually learned was there are a bunch. So here was the biggest trick. What we wanted is to show that Inestrade and Shadowmore are different. But similar. Like what we did in Inestrade is like, I'm a human. and I turn into a big bad werewolf. You want it to be the big bad warwolf.

The big bad war wolf is way more powerful than the tiny human. The tiny human is the drawback of it. But the idea is we didn't want to say, oh, Lorwyn is the little tiny people in Shadamore. The big, like, the idea was we wanted, in fact, I think on all the double-faced cards,

I believe, I believe this is true. This is the true at handoff, is all the power toughness in each side is the same. Meaning, if I'm a two-two on my Lorwyn's side, I'm a two-two on my Shadamor. side. That when you're changing the element of what you are and who you are, you're not fundamentally, I mean, you're, you are you, you are you, just your outlook and some attributes are a little bit

different, but it's not like you change from tiny to huge. You are, you are you. And so, it turned out that trying to get really good designs that we liked, we, we, it wasn't a one-way transformation as well. You could go back and forth between Lauren and Shadowmore. So it couldn't just be play side A, get to side B, and you're done, which is a lot simpler. It was play side A, somehow get to side B. And we also decided that we liked it rather than have a trigger that made it happen,

we liked that you had some control. The idea being that if I'm in Lord, when I could walk to Shadowmore and turn to my Shadamore side, I have a lot more control than I did once upon a time. So we ended up making it that there's mana. You can pay mana. And a lot of them have, when you transform, things happen. So it kind encourages you go back and forth. But anyway, we ended up, I think, only having seven transform cards.

So that started as a much bigger part of the set. And as we sort of worked with, we realized it was very exacting what we needed. And so rather, like, just make the ones that make the most sense. And we ratcheted it down on that. Okay. Other things. Evoke. So Evoke was a very popular mechanic I had made, actually, in Lorwyn.

The idea when I originally made it was I liked the... the idea of spells that kicked into creatures. So the idea where they were instant sorceries, and if you paid the kicker cost, they became creatures. Turns out the game really doesn't like instant sorcerers on the battlefield, and the words needed to transform it from instant sorcery into a creature, was wordy. So what we ended up doing was we made it such that you had creatures

that had entered the battlefield effects. If you paid their evoke costs, they were cheaper, but then they went away. But if you paid the full cost, then you got their ETB effects and you got the creature. So it had the sense I wanted, which is this option between spell or spell and creature. And that incarnation of them did allow it to happen. We talked a lot about do we want to vocaboke.

It was a popular mechanic. In the end, we ended up making a cycle, I think they're mythic rare. And what we did is we combined them with another mechanic from Shadowmore, where depending on what mana, there's a 10-card cycle in Shadowmore of spells, that depending on what mana you used to pay them, affected what they did.

So we sort of took the evoke creatures and that Shadamore cycle and morph them together into creatures, incarnations, where when you play them, they're hybrid creatures, and if you pay one cost, they do one enter effect, and if you pay the other,

if you use the other color, they pay the other. And if you sort of mix and match them, you can get both effects if you're playing both colors. But the idea is they can go in each color deck and do something, but they're optimized in a two-color deck. Other things We did end up putting

Conspire and Persist and Wither in the set in cameos So they do show up in small amount There's a little bit of convoke in the set Because that played really well There is a cycle of cards That are not exactly the champion mechanic But are champion inspired

I think it's a rare cycle They all have champion in their name The reason they're not champion exactly is one of the challenges of when we made champ, Champion was in Lorowin, we were trying to do the idea of creatures evolving, but rather A, always becoming B, we tied it a creature type.

So any elf become this special elf. And the idea was, when you did it, you had to exile an elf you had from, or whatever the creature was from the game. Then if your creature died, you got that creature back. So now, you have to behold a creature, and then you exile the beholded a creature, and then if the creature dies,

the Behold of the creature goes back to your hand. So it allows you to have value of having the card in your hand rather than having me on the battlefield because that's not exactly what a voc is. We couldn't write a voc on the car. I was not to quote to say. That's not what champion is. We couldn't write champion on the cards.

So we made the nod toward that. Another thing that we brought back that I honestly, I was skeptical we were going to. So Lorwyn introduced a new car type at the time called Tribal. We now refer to it as Kindred. and we had done So the idea was

Kindred allows you to put creature types onto non-creature card types You can have enchantments or artifacts or instance or sorceries that are goblin or elf or whatever And we did that because there's some interaction Where whenever you cast a goblin Or get a goblin back from your graveyard

There's some things where there is interaction Where it not being a creature Does mean something What we ended up finding out is I think we used them in in Laurewin block or at least in Lorwynn. I don't think we used it in Shadowmore.

And then we brought them back on the Aldrazi in Battle for Zendikar Block. But we eventually realized that it just adds a lot of words for cards and most of the time, Typle Effects want, care about creatures. And so it didn't feel like there was enough things that mattered that it was worth

putting all this extra words on cards. So we stopped doing it. And then we did a little bit in Modern Horizons 3 for the Aldrazi because the Aldrazi had used it when the Adrazi were in Battle for Zendikar. And then when we came back to Lorain, we were like, well, this is the place where it came from.

Okay, maybe we'll do a little bit of it. So I think there's 13 cards with Kindred, two of which are reprints from original Lorwynn Block. So we included that. And then, like I said, we ended up kicking out plus and plus a plus account from minus one minus one. Oh, we introduced a new creature type,

Sorcerer. We started using Shaman a lot less, and we like to have five sort of spell user types so we can put them on different color of creatures. So we introduced Sorcerer here. So Sorcercerer introduced. What did I not mention? 283 cards.

Art director was Deborah Garcia. Codename was wrestling. The set came out January 23rd, 2006. Okay, I'm almost to work. So let me walk through the draft archetypes real quick. And then we will call it a day. Okay, so white, blue is Murphoke.

So we brought back Murphoke and Lorwyn had this theme of tapping as a cost that both you could tap them and they cared about being tapped. So some of them had rewards for being tapped. Like, when you tap them, it generated effects. And then other things required you to tap

Murphoke to do things. So tapping Murphoke both became a cost you could pay and a thing that could generate effects. and so we brought that back. I think all the typos are in the colors they existed in Lorwyn. Blue black is kind of a flash control. It's got a little bit of a fairy theme. When we originally were looking at doing ally colors,

fairies were one of our five. But when we decided to sort of go where we can mix around colors, we ended up dropping fairies from the major ones. Ferrys weren't actually a major tribe in the previous visit, they ended up becoming really, really powerful and constructed. So when people think of Lorwyn, they do think of fairies because of how powerful they weren't constructed. There was less fairies in the set in Lorwyn

than there were a lot of the other types. But anyway, if you play blue-black, there is a little bit of a fairy type of element to that theme. It's not as strong as the other type of themes, but it is there a little bit if you like fairies. Black-red is goblins, and they play around with minus one. minus one counters with blight and other minus one minus one synergies. Red green is vivid mid-range.

So that plays around wanting a lot of colors. It's red and green and red and green are the colors that can most easily splash for colors. And so it's red-green, but it does let you splash other colors. And the idea is to get all five colors represented. Note, because of hybrid, you can do some of that without even going outside of mountains and forests. Green, white, is Kithkin. Kithkin are a go-wide deck. They're the ones most likely to make tokens,

have small creatures. Green and white are the creature colors. It makes a lot of sense. White black is blight control. So that is the idea where I'm using minus one and minus one counters, but I'm more often to blight my opponent, more often to sort of use them.

And there is some amount of blighting in our stuff in white black. But anyway, it uses blight in a slower, more controlling way. Blue red is elemental. Elementals. They want you to play bigger spells. Spells that are four or greater, and there's rewards for doing that. Black greener elves. Elves have a graveyard theme. They want you to sort of recur stuff from the graveyard,

and they care about things being in the graveyard, so they have a graveyard theme. Red, white is blight agro. So that is more playing, using blight and minus one more encounters into more aggressive. So white black is blight control, red white is blight agro. And then green blue is zes. VividRamp. The idea, it's a ramp environment, ramp strategy, which Green Blue does a lot. And then Vivid, much like you're doing with Vivid Mid Range, it wants you to splash a little bit. Once again, hybrid can accomplish a lot of these tasks. But the idea is in the extra bonus things.

Vivid is in red, green and green blue. Vivid red green a little faster than green blue. And then blight is in white black and red white, red white being a little faster than white black. Blue Black makes use of things cast... Fafter. There's a little bit of minus one minus Garner there. But also, like I said, it's playing to fairies. There are tree folk and giants. That's the two other.

There are eight creature types that we really focused on in Lauren Block. Five of them are the draft archetypes. Ferry show up a little bit in the Black Blue Deck. And then there are tree folk and giants. They're not quite as typal... I mean, there's a few typo cards with them, but they're more made for constructed than limited,

although they do show up in limited, and you can, depending on what you draft early sometimes, there are a few type of cards you can draft earlier than maybe you can do a little bit. We did, by the way, bring back changelings. One of the things we did is, and this is true whenever we bring back things, not only do we mechanic, like, whenever we bring back a set,

we have to look at it mechanically and figure out, okay, are they mechanical things we want to do? What mechanics to bring back? What do we tweak? What do we do new? The same is for the creative. And I think the idea for the changelings was, like, one of the things we decided at the first visit is shapeshifters really can throw a wrench in story sometimes. Because if anybody can be anybody, there's this assumption of, oh, how do I know that this person is that person?

And Brady Domit, who was in charge of creative during Lorwin, really put his foot down and said, I don't want anybody be confused that any creature could be a changeling. So he came up with what we sort of refer to as the jello mold kind of look of them. We redid them a little bit. They had the same philosophy, which is you can tell a changeling a changeling a changeling.

Changes aren't fooling anybody that they're changeling. Yeah, they can change their shape, their shapeshifters, and they can mimic things. That's why the typel works with them. But they're not, from a story perspective, it's not like you don't know that that's a changeling. You can see it's a changeling. So they did do, and there was a lot of, once again, one of the challenges, oh, I guess I should mention this.

One of the biggest challenges of doing the set was, it was going to be one set. Like I said, just getting the green light for one set was tricky. And I do fundamentally believe that the mixing of Lorwyn and Shadamore is the thing that allows the set to sort of have this core identity that separates Lorwyn and Shadamore from other worlds. I think the duality is the most exciting part of Lorwin and Chathamore. And I believe we could do that in one set. The challenge is there are four sets, two large sets and two small sets of things that we could pull from. And unlike Kamagawa, like when we went back and we did Kamagawa, there wasn't a lot to salvage. There's ninjitsu, and that was it.

I mean, we did bring back channel, but that channel is the thing we do all the time. we decided we didn't need to name it, but we brought it back name just because we're trying to be reminiscent of Kamagawa. There was way, way less to bring back. There's some individual cycles and cards, but mechanically, there's a lot. There was a lot more to bring back in Lorwin Shadamore. Not everything was a success.

I'm sure the average person can even tell you what Conspider does. But there was a lot to work with, and that one of the challenges is we had one set. For example, one of the complaints I got is that we didn't do a lot with the Lorwyn coloring of things. That if, you know, elves, for example, on Shadowmore,

sorry, we didn't do that with the Shadowmore coloring of things. On Shadowmore, elves went from green black to green white. Oh, where are all the white elves? Well, we didn't do that. We were trying to do a typo theme. Typele themes are really exacting

what you need to do. We made it black green. So there aren't elves showing up in white. Somebody did bring up the good point that we could have made the back sides of the double face cards. Both, like, we could have changed

and into the colors they were on Shadowmore. That's a fine note. A good note. The other thing, by the way, is I think our current philosophy in the world of, you know, mostly one sets is if we do something and players really like it, the fact that we do so many different worlds,

it just makes it easier to come back to things. You know, back in the world where a block existed for a whole block, you know, it took a long time to come back to something. Unless it was a major, major, major hit. But now we have a lot more ability to come back. And I will say, at the time of taping this, Lorwyn is looking like

it's going to be a big hit. At the time of me recording this, pre-releases had happened. You know, that there's a lot of I've seen, and on my blog, I've seen a lot of excitement. People are really excited.

And one of the notes in general is, whereas I wanted more of these unique creature types that showed up in Even Tide. I wanted to see more of this theme or that theme or this mechanic or that mechanic. Like a lot of it is, there's the thing that I loved from Lorwin-Shadermar block

and that thing isn't here. And the answer essentially is, look, we had one set. There's only so much we could get into one set. I think we prioritize what we thought were the best things. But I get it. You know, if you... There was no way for us to get everything that was Lorwyn and Shadamore. Now, the good news is we can go back there.

We can visit again. and, you know, when you leave things on the table, there's stuff you can do when you get to revisit. So I am excited that there is some gas in the tank, if you will, that if we go back to Lorwyn-Shadamore, there's other things we can do. But anyway, like I said, one of the things that it's always interesting is returns can be a tricky thing. Returns are all about kind of recapturing what players liked.

When something's a runaway hit, that's a lot easier because, oh, well, this is what players like. When something has a lot more challenge to it, it's like, okay, you know, let's figure out what people like, what was it the kernel of something really cool, but we have to sort of work with it. A lot of sort of revisits on unpopular places, at least from the first time out, is figuring out what was the cool thing about it, how did it shine, you know, and there's ways for us to sort of to find something that we can, how do we take the essence of what made Lorwynne Lorowin?

Oh, the other thing I should mention is we spent a lot of time and we, the creative team and the artists trying to recapture the feel of Lorwyn, which I think they did an amazing job. The set really captures, Lorwyn had a very distinctive feel to it, which at the time was controversial, by the way, at the time, there were people that didn't like how light it was,

that wasn't magic. But magic has gone through a lot since then. We've done a lot. We've done Eldrain. We've done Bloomboro. We've definitely showed that magic can expand to later tones. So it was fun really doing that, getting back to old artists. You know, I really think they did an amazing job of adding a lot of layers just to the look and feel of the set.

So anyway, guys, I hope you guys enjoy Lower One Eclipsed. It was super fun to make. And like I said, there was a lot of moving pieces. It was a very challenging design in the sense that we really wanted to capture what people loved about the world. We wanted to do right by Lorwin and Shadowmore. We had a lot

of things we could do and we had a lot of themes that we had to intermix. And, you know, making color matters viable while making typo viable is not as easy as it sounds. Obviously, we did. It's doable. But anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed Lorwyn Eclipse. Like I said, very proud of it. I think we made a super fun

set. And even if you are not a old timer that knew Lauren and Shadamore, played the Lauren Shadamore, even if you just played with the cards and heard about it, it's fun to have the revisit. And I, as a fan of magic, who love magic, who, you know, there's no one more

enfranchised than me, I really, I'm so happy. Like I said, I've been trying to get back for Lauren forever. So I'm happy to finally see it happen. So anyway, guys, I hope you enjoyed today's podcast. I got a little extra bonus time, and some traffic. But luckily, I got to talk more about Lauren clips, so I was good.

But I'm now at work, so we only know that means, means the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. I'll see you all next time. Bye-bye.