Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1311: Lorwyn Eclipsed Creative with Neale LaPlante Johnson

Episode Date: February 6, 2026

In this podcast, I sit down with Neale LaPlante Johnson, the creative lead of Lorwyn Eclipsed, to talk all about the worldbuilding for the set.

I'm not pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for other drive-to-work at Home Edition. So today, I have Neil LePont-Johnson, who is the creative lead for Lorwyn-Eclipsed to talk all about the world building and creative of Lorwyn-Eclips. Hello, Neil. This is Neil. Hey, Mark.

I'm glad to be here again. As Mark said, I'm the creative lead of World Warwick-Eclipsed, and I couldn't be happier with this set. and how fans are receiving it. So, great stuff. So the interesting, we're going to start a little different place today because I actually play a big role in the very early part of the story, and then we'll hand off to you in which I play a very small role,

is I've been trying to get us to do Lorwyn for years. And the pitch that I sort of came with was I knew that we didn't have space to do two different sets. And because we had done a lot of worlds that were similar to Lorwin and Shadowmore individually, I felt really, really important that you needed to see both of them because a lot of what, to me, defines Lorwyn is Shadamore. And so I pitched the idea of they start melding together, that the world is part Lorwyn and part Shadamore. And so that is the pitch that I made for years,

and it wasn't until Kamagawa did well that we put Lorwyn on some thing we asked the public, and it scored really well on that, and that finally got us to do it. So I do know when you guys started that the one given was it's Lorwyn plus Shadamor. That was the one stirring off point. So what did you guys do with that? So basically we had to kind of conceive of what the world would be if it was just like both of these things mix. I think the interesting tension of the original Lorwyn and Shadamore Box was, you know, when it became night, essentially you switched to your Shadamore form.

And when it became day, you switched to your Shadamore form. or lore would happen, you know, but you can only be one or the other. And you didn't really know about, unless you were one of the main characters from, you know, the narrative or Una, you didn't really know that that was happening. And so we thought that that proposal sounded really interesting from it, like an ideological or maybe like an identity kind of issue. So it's like, but what if you knew that there was like a shadow self out there or like a reflection that, you know, you could see in the mirror, but you couldn't really interact with?

And so we tested a bunch of prompts and premises. about, you know, what if they blended together and then them blending together, poisoned the world or did all these weird things. But I think fans were kind of like, I just want to see these two worlds collide and just kind of be able to re-experience them. Because for a lot of players, the only way they experienced the original blocks was, you know, through kind of onnosis through a commander or someone told them about how awesome it was back in the day. And since Maddoch has grown so much since the original block, Lorenbach debuted,

we just wanted to make sure that players could, you know, step into this world and kind of rediscover why players who have been, you know, so enthusiastic about it recently. So, yeah, we just took that and we said, like, yeah, that's the right thing. Let's just do it as pure as possible. Throw in a little, you know, Easter eggs, like these eclipsed realms for, like, long-time fans. But in the end, we were like, let's just play it straight. So what does that entail? I mean, like, I know when we return to a world that one of the things you guys have to do is sort of like, well, what are the good parts that we want to save? And what are the parts like, yeah, we probably could do something better than that?

Yeah, I think it's, it came down to the most important element of the Lorven Shattimore blocks, at least from our perspective, we were developing. And I think probably mechanically, this is the same, were creature types. We wanted to make sure that the main creature types that everybody kind of, assuming. with Lorber and Shadowmore kind of showed up again. That was the big picture here. And so we kind of built from there, like in a very technical sense, we said, like, okay, well, we know we have elves and Flamekin and Kithkin and Goblins and Murphoke. We know we have those. So what is the best way to kind of preserve that identity?

And then we kind of trimmed the fat in terms of things that were really interesting. Like some of the things that I really liked about original Shadowmore block, in particular. were like the demi-gods and things. And we kind of said, well, if we had to get one thing right, it wasn't that. It was the creatures and the awesome, you know, marrow doing weird things to Boggerts and stuff like that. Like, that was the core of it. So you kind of work from there and you see how much set and you fill up with just that.

And then you kind of make a kind of tiered list to say, like, okay, well, let's make sure we include like a, you know, a Gilder Baron reference. Or let's make sure that we, you know, have at least like one early, you know, chin or like, you know, another oof, just stuff like that. So you kind of build piecemeal and say what do players expect when we say we're going back to Lauren Shadamore? That's, you know, typo.

These are the creature types. And then you kind of add things to it and make this kind of, you know, impromptu-stoo kind of world-building decisions. Okay, let's walk through the main creature types. I'm just going to go in Woburg order here. So we'll start with Kithkin.

What are the challenges of Kithkin, making Kithkin? So Kithkin were one of the creature types that I think a lot of players when they first saw them thought they weren't particularly appealing. They have this kind of uncanny valley look to them. And, you know, they're not, you know, if you were to rank magic creatures on cool and evocative and, you know, you get things like elves or, you know, so like that. But Kithkin, the challenge there was a lot of players have this sort of perception that they're not very cool. So our goal is to like really emphasize what makes them important. The Stottweft, the ideas of community.

And we knew from like a set like Bloomberg, that players aren't allergic to the idea of community and coming together and working together as like a inspirational message and kind of a through line for a faction. So we just really leaned in. We made sure that the Kifkin, at least in Lorwyn, we're super communal and friendly and open.

And then we can take their shadow ourselves and make them, you know, isolation. and xenophobic, turn those dials up a lot and made sure that everybody knew exactly what they were about. So they were fun. The challenge was kind of making sure that they looked a little bit cooler than the original set and also giving them some fun like mounts and stuff so they could ride big chickens and other things like that. Okay, next up, let's talk Murphoke. Yeah, Murpholk are super interesting because to me they had a lot, like maybe the least developed sort of personality. They kind of just did trade, and that was the kind of vibe that I got the

original set. I didn't find them super, you know, inspiring the first time around. So we wanted to kind of take that to its extreme again and say, like, well, if they're doing trade, who do they trade with? It's very friendly. Who do they have, like, good relationships with? Who do they have, like, these kind of weird relationships with? And, you know, what does trade mean in a post-Frexene invasion world is trying to rebuild, like, how important can Murphoke be to a world that's trying to build connections again? And also, a world that is now kind of split into, that, you know, you have these, you know, Laurel and Murfolk don't want to venture into Shadowmore waters or things like that. And so trade becomes way more important, communication and messaging and their ability to traverse

the world in ways that other folks can't, and to try to make sure that that was really apparent and emphasized. Okay. And what is the Shadowmore Murpho versus the Lower Wind Murpho? So the Shadowmore Murpho still care about trade, but they're going to either swindle you

or do something nasty to get their end of the, you know, get the better end of the deal. And so basically, while the Lorwyn Murph folk might be these kind of fair trade, you know, open trade, mercantile folks, you can liken the

Shadow and Moerfolk at their best to be kind of swindlers. And at their worst, pirates, you know, and there's no big giant bodies of water on the, you know, the plane of Lorman Shattomor. But, you know, they'd be sailing down the river and kind of, you know, raid a Boggart Hovel. I don't know what they'd find in a Boggart Hovel, but, you know, they might do that or, you know, raid a safehold run by the elves of Shadowmore and try and, you know, pick treasures out of that. And so, yeah, they're kind of like the dark reflection. It's mercantilism, but taken to the kind of, like naughty and kind of evil extreme. Okay, next up is the goblins, which I don't people remember,

but they were base black in Lorwyn, not base red. Yeah. So the goblins, they're called Boggerts in Lorraine Shadowmore. The cool thing that we want to do for them is goblins on every single magic player are different, right? They have different appearances. They all have the kind of same energy, right? their kind of chaos demon kind of, you know, they'll break things and, you know, fight and stuff like that.

But the Lorwyn ones have this kind of like village witch, just kind of, you know, like they're trying to brew potions and you don't know the kind of result of what's going to happen on Lorwyn. But overall, they're kind of benign, if kind of like prankstery. They might do stuff that's gross, but they might not harm you either. And on Shadowmore, they kind of embody this role of, you know, like pure chaos. and consumption. Well, the Lorwynne Roblins and Boggerts are trying to find new experiences through, you know, discovering new things and having fun and bringing weird potions. The Shadowmore Boggerts goblins are trying to find new experiences through kind of violence and pain and this kind of mix of pleasure and all these kind of weird tropes to the point that they like to fight so much

that they'll nail, you know, iron to their skin as armor. And it's like this weird mix of pleasure, pain, and all this kind of stuff. So they're cool, they're fun. They're probably the most fun to write concepts and to, you know, do art briefs for because you can kind of make them do anything and look like it's kind of all canon. Okay. Next up is the Flamekin, the Elementals. Yeah, so the Flamekin are, you know, the, well, in the original block,

Flamekin were just pure red aligned, well, you know, or they're all fire, red fire flamekin. And then we went to Shadowmore, they were cinders. Here we have this idea for a kind of mechanical solve. Design came to us and said, hey, we want blue red flamekin. And so we said, okay, well, we're going to have to make up to this blue flamekin. What's a cool new piece of world within that we can add? And so the flamekin are all about this idea of self-discovery. And so red flame can, we can see our, you know, self-discovery.

a sense of, you know, they're looking for outside, you know, inspiration. They're, you know, climbing mountains or they're, they're commuting with their, you know, giant elemental, you know, brethren. Whereas these blue flamkin that we've introduced, Rimekin are kind of introspective kind of self-discovery. They kind of look inward and say, you know, you know, who am I? What am I about? And so we thought it was a cool kind of parallel. The difference between the Lorwyn and Shattimore ones are the Lorwyn Flamkin and Rhymkin, I think, are about community on some level. They're always about trying to reach out and kind of expand their knowledge base. In Shadowmore, originally there were cinders who were kind of destructive and kind of, you know,

nihilistic destroyers. But now we've kind of seen that they're just sort of more isolationist, that they're more about kind of self-discovery in exclusion to the rest of the world. You'll see that a lot in Shadowmore is the idea that Lorwyn is about openness and connecting things. And Shadowmore is far more about like keeping to yourself. Okay, that brings us two elves. Yeah, elves are, you know, a perennial favorite for, I think, most magic players. And the Lorwyn elves, we kind of kept the same. They originally were kind of the rulers of the plane.

They had, you know, their entire domain was the plane. They kind of ruled ruthlessly with an iron fist. And they were kind of these eugenicists. They would call and kill all these different species. that they didn't think they were beautiful enough. And that's a central kind of conceit of all the elves on Lorwin and Shattimore is they value beauty. Lorwyn elves value beauty through, you know, expanding their empire and kind of culling what they deem is imperfect. They used to call them, or at least publicly used to call them iBlights if you weren't pretty enough.

After the phrexian invasion, we kind of said, well, it's kind of hard to maintain an empire after you've been, you know, basically fought to the brink by, you know, interplanar flow. foe and then Shadamore kind of cuts off all of your trade routes and, you know, a lot of the infrastructure that you might have had. And so while they're weaker, they're still kind of vying for the, you know, their return of their empire. And on the Shadamore side, they also value beauty, but what they value is kind of preserving beauty rather than destroying what isn't beautiful. So you'll see them collecting, you know, beautiful flowers or tending to groves and, you know, trying to make sense of the chaos of Lorwyn Shadowmore, or Shadomor in that case. Yeah, one of the weird things

One of the things we purposely did last time is that the elves were the ones that when you changed from Lorwyn to Shadowmore, like some of the darker elements were on the Lorwyn side, which was a little different from how most of the world worked. Yeah, I think it was, it's definitely felt really inspired and kept the setting feeling fresh.

I think it's a big reason why Lorwyn and Shadowmore kind of live in a lot of players' heads. It's very kind of subversive fantasy. On the other hand, it does make it a little tricky because they do violate, you know, all the times we want to do mechanics that feel kind of like mean or whatever. We have to, you know, think like, well, that goes on the Lorwyn elves, but the Shadowmore of everything else. So an interesting problem, it works out to be usually totally fine in the card set. But they definitely add some spice to the whole, the setting in a way that a lot of other magic settings. One, don't explicitly have, you know, super evil elves all the time.

also don't have the contrast. When you go to the dark side, the evil people actually flit allegiances, sort of, you know, to put it kind of rotely. Okay, so I talked about the five main creature types, but there are three more, because Lorwin had eight creature types. The five premier ones, we focused on a little bit more of each of their own archetype, for example. But there are three more, so let's talk through the other three. So we'll start with the fairies. Yeah, you know, fairies are a fan favorite, and they've tormented many, you know, gameplay table. And we knew that players really wanted fairies to, you know, show up in some capacity, which is one of the reasons why, you know, in working with the design lead of the set, Michael Majors,

making sure that the kind of the chase card, the card that everybody's going to want to play and put in their decks, is that bitter bloom bearer is a fairy and a reference to, you know, a super iconic card from the original blocks. That kind of made sense. And we tried to put as many fairies as we could. The fairies, in summary, are all about kind of pranks and whimsy. And for a long time, fairies really didn't change, like in the original blocks, much between Lorwyn Shattimore. With the downfall of Una, who was, you know, the matron and mother of all fairies, now they change a little bit more, but they're kind of the least changed even still.

So in original Lorwyn, what you'll notice is they're kind of more the traditional fairy. they're insectoid that you can see kind of faces. And on Shadowmore, they have these bug carapaces and whatnot. But outside of the visual changes, you can just imagine the Shadowmore once is a little bit more cruel, but they're still pulling pranks. They're still, you know, siphoning dreams. They're still doing all the same things. And maybe the next time we come back, we'll see them have changed even more, you know.

As the downfall of Una gets further and further away, maybe we'll see them kind of adapt to their new homes and unique and interesting ways. Yeah, when we made the original Lorwyn, we thought it was cool. We liked the idea that there was one group that went from being kind of meaner to nicer, which was the elves. And we thought it was cool that there was one group that didn't change that much. And the fairies were who we picked to be the ones that really didn't change. For example, every other creature type changes color in Shadamor, except for the fairies.

The fairies don't change color. Yep. Okay, so let's move on to the Prefoke. Yeah, Treefolk. you know, there's one of those iconic magic creatures, at least from my perspective, Doren, emerged from the original Loran Block. And Treefog, I think, are a fan favorite. I think people just love the idea of these sentient trees, you know, walloping people.

And they really lean into like a unique, usually a unique mechanical direction where it's, you know, toughness matters. And so we didn't really change a lot. We just kind of said, you know, on Lorwyn, the trees are sentient, they're wizened, their age, and their mentors. But if you cross them, obviously, they can get, you know, pretty prickly. But on Shadowmore, the trefo kind of leaves a lot of that sapiens. You know, they're not really able to kind of reason.

And you can think of them kind of as savage defenders of the forest in that case. So that's the kind of, you know, direction we went. I mean, we had to bring back Dorian. I'll just give a huge shout out to, you know, Doran. And we saw his Lorham inside last time. And I knew that I wanted to show a shot. Chathamore side and hopefully break a couple of players' hearts and make them, you know, a little sad, but, you know, in the fun way.

Okay. And the final of the eight is Giants. Yeah. Giants kind of echoed the same kind of direction we had for Treefolk, where in Lorwyn, they are, you know, they can still fight, you know, they can still, you know, be aggressive. But oftentimes they're more just curious and they're well-traveled and they're very smart. But they just don't really like to interact with smaller folk. And, you know, that's always fun.

It's a cool trope space. And their whole thing and all the Giants' whole thing is the idea that they will go into deep sleeps. And Laura, when we call them kind of name sleeps and other kinds of sleeps, where they kind of dream up, you know, fantastical things. And there's a lot of different lore there. And, you know, it's hard to keep track, to be honest. And in Shadowmore, they also become a little more savage.

they lose a little bit of that sapiens. And their sleeps turn to these massively long hibernations where you can see, you know, boulders and roots and trees kind of grow out of them because they've slept for so long that they've become basically immobile and kind of bound to the earth. And then when they finally awaken and pulled themselves up, you know, they're covered in the land itself. So that was cool. Okay, so there actually is a secret ninth group.

So I'm going to talk a little bit about their history and then we'll explain what you guys did to update them. So when we are working on original Lorwin, we ran into this problem that the creature gets very siloed, that you need creature, you want players fighting over cards when you're drafting, just makes for a better draft. And so we needed what we, at the time I referred to as glue, typal glue. And so we came up with the idea of changeling, which was based on Miss Form Ultimus, was a legendary creature I had made many years before

that players really liked. And so the idea was let's just make this new thing that are every creature type. And so any deck would want them. And when we originally pitched the idea Brader Donovan, who was the head of the creative team at the time, he had no problem with shapeshifters, but he didn't

want what he referred to as traditional shapeshifters, where they just look like the thing they're supposed to be, meaning he thought it affected the story too much. If any creature could secretly be something else, it's hard to tell the story. So he really wanted them changelings to have a very

distinctive look that you just knew they were a changeling visually. And they ended up coming up with what a lot of players referred to as the jello mold look of an original Laurewin. They were a green and they started to see-through. So what did you guys do to update changelings? I think it was purely a kind of visual direction change. So the original changelings were

oftentimes kind of unsettling at at best. There were some cute ones, I think, from the original blocks, or the original Lorwyn block, but they weren't really fun to look at. And so we kind of took the approach to just update their direction visually. And one of our, you know, principal concept artist, Jayhan Chu, basically in a day, came up with this new direction for changelings, you know, keeping these big eyes, but also the idea that they're not really good at disguising themselves. So to, you know, Brady's point, and I didn't really even know that, you could always kind of tell that a changeling was a changeling. They just sort of resembled their forms. So they might resemble a bird and they resemble a tree.

But really, it was just trying to update them to feel a little bit more toyetic and cute to kind of capture the idea that these are playful and fun and exciting rather than kind of creepy and gross, because there's a lot of creepy and gross in the original, you know, Lorwyn and Shadowmore blocks. and not so much fun and whimsy sometimes or not as much as modern audiences have an appetite for, at least I'll say that. So making sure they looked fun, they were cute

that if you held them, they also still feel like jelly but they look like they could be like a cute friend rather than like a weird creep. So another interesting thing that happened in the original block is so even... Shadowmore was ally colors, and we shifted the creatures, so they all ended up in ally color combinations, or most of them did.

But then we get to even tie to their enemy color combinations, they couldn't really use all the same creatures, especially on the hybrid stuff. So the creative team had to come up with a whole bunch of new creature types. So even tied, introduced a lot of extra creature types. So I know you guys wanted to, you know, cameo them or have them show up a little bit. Can you talk a little bit about getting the noggles? and oops and stuff like that in? Yeah, I think the difficulty is that in a single magic set,

I think there's just not enough room for everything. Even on a baseline magic set that we're developing today, there's always more ideas that can ever make it into a file, both from design, both from creative. But we wanted to make sure that a couple of them had some nods. And so wherever we could, you know, to ask, you know, our design team and say, like, hey, you know, carve out space for at least,

one noggle or you know if you can have you know an oof reference and I talked about gilder bairn and we I think the one we have now is glister bairn or or something similar and just trying to carve out intentional references for players and I know we didn't get to all of them I know we don't have any hags in the set and we didn't do a mimics that were the kind of you know shadow more form of changelings we didn't even get to those but trying to make sure that we had some semblance of, you know, references and homages that players could at least say, like, oh, they didn't forget about these. Novels were a big one that people internally were like, I really want noggles.

And I was like, great, I don't think we can have a lot, but we can at least have one or two. And hopefully everyone's satisfied with that. Yeah, another thing that I talked about this, I think in my preview article, one of my articles, is how in the original set, there was a thing that steals goats and I really wanted a goat in an original Lorowin and we just couldn't fit in a goat. So I was so excited if you guys got a goat in that made me very happy.

I was, I think that's one of my favorite designs of the entire, maybe the entire set, the commander design off-nabbed goat. It's kind of like a full circle joke and it was nice to get goat nap in, you know, originally when I started playing magic, I didn't really get

why you'd be stealing goats. And it took me maybe like two years to realize, oh, wait, changelings are goats. Yes. And so I know it was a fun, clever thing. And coming back to it, I think a lot of players remember just how absurd

that card seemed. And us kind of, you know, paying off, you know, 15 plus years of that card existing. So it was fun. Yeah, the funny thing was at the time, I wanted there to be one goat. So people go, you made goat nap for one goat? And they're like, no, no,

there didn't be no goats if we had a big argument at a time. So, I eventually did make goat tokens in like Even Tides. Just to say, there are goats in the world. Goat nappers are actually gnapping something. There are goats in the world. They have a profession. They're employed.

Okay, so we talked for all of different creatures. In the little time we have left, do you want to talk a little bit about just environment, about how I'm really interested in sort of how you differentiated Lorwyn from Shadowmore and how you tackled when Lorwyn meets Shadowmore? Yeah. So I think we're kind of, you know, when you think about the worlds, you brought up a great point that Lorwin and Shadowmore don't really exist without each other. And I think even naturally just in the course of developing the original blocks, the contrast of this kind of day and night really ended up being the kind of, you know, still the golden ticket. That's the way that we pitched it internally is, you know, this is the return to the plane of light and shadow, you know, day and night. And so really it was kind of.

of cranking up the kind of elements to 11, you know, making sure that Lorwyn is bright and whimsical and fun. And I think it was just that in the original. We made more changes to Shadowmore in that we use a lot of kind of like thick brambles and underlighting things. So, you know, bioluminescent light that comes from the ground or, you know, ancient magics that are kind of underneath characters that gives off a kind of sinister look when you look at someone. It's sort of like when you hold a flashlight under your chin, you know, when you're telling a scary story. And there's a lot of characters that will look like that, kind of feel sinister just from the lighting. And so that's how we've solved the differences between those.

And when we thought about merging them and, you know, what would happen if they came together, we wanted to feel like you could recognize elements of both. So there's brightness and there's underlighting. And the creatures would, you know, carry features from both forms. Like they might have the horns from one type of elves, but, you know, have the kind of facial structure of another type. of Elf from, you know, Shattimore or whatever. But the big thing is trying to make sure that even though you can recognize it, it felt kind of bizarre and alien.

Like it shouldn't be, it doesn't feel right. We wanted people to feel like these people and these places were really out of place in Lorwyn Shadamor that they kind of represented a almost existential threat or dread. So when you enter them, you know, for an example, when you enter them, if you stay too long, you will become what's called a calciform creature. So you'll become, you know, basically turn yourself to stone because your mind is trying to reconcile Lorwyn and Shadowmore memories and both of these selves coming together.

And so it kind of represents this kind of false promise of merging the planes in a way that's really unsettling because, you know, in truth, the fun part about Lorwyn-Shattimore is not figuring out what happens when, you know, Lorwyn and Shadowmore don't exist and the third thing happens. It's mostly about the light and the dark. So we wanted to make sure this wasn't a, you know, oh, we're going to fix everything by merging them together. It was like, oh, no, this is also dangerous. This isn't the solution you're looking for.

You know, one of my favorite things, there's a metaphor that you guys came up with that I really liked. You want to talk a little bit about how the metaphor of the marble cake came to be? So I think it was really hard to explain how this world looked before we had a lot of concept art and kind of visuals for the set. And when you're in meetings with, you know, executives and you're trying to explain, like, well, here's our premise of, you know, we're smashing Lorwin and Shadamore together. And everyone's like, okay, so it's like one half of the plane is Lorwyn, one half Shadamore. And there's like a dividing line or, you know, how does it work? And we just thought that wasn't nearly as interesting. So we were thinking, well, we want them to kind of mix together so you could have these pockets of Lorwyn and pockets of Shadamore.

And it still felt like we were just having like little circles of darkness in the light. not really what we were thinking. And so I don't know who came up with it if it was myself or art director Deborah or if it was just sort of an errant comment. But it's just like when you, when you think about marble cakes, you think about these two colors that they don't turn gray, right? They don't, they don't blend. They keep their own kind of identity. And that was really cool. I don't, I can't even tell you who came up with it. But as soon as somebody did, we can start using that to explain it to people who, you know, who just maybe heard about the set or kind of like, you know, trying to figure out how to market it or other things like that.

And they're like, oh, can't get that. That makes sense. And it was also great to give to artists and be like, this, like, look at a marble cake and you'll figure out what we're trying to do here. The other cool thing about it that people understand is the marbling keeps moving. It is not as if any one spot on the map is always Lorain or always Shadamore. And that's one of the really intriguing things is that you, the individual, you will shift between the Lorwin-Shadamore's side, depending on where things are, how the geography

changes. Yeah. I think it's a nice existential threat to a lot of these folks, because really the most interesting parts for a lot of folks when it comes to Lorwyn-Shadamore that are hard to communicate in a card game like magic are these kind of moments of intellectual kind of weirdness. Magic can be a very tactile game, right? There's a lot of physicality. Creatures are fighting, you know, we're casting, you know, lightning bolts and whatnot. But I think at its core, a lot of folks are really intrigued by the idea of this Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde kind of nature. And so the idea that one day you could wake up and you weren't yourself or you kind of notice that

the darkness is inching closer in your Kifkin village. And so maybe it to pack up and move. And what does that mean for folks? And it's added so much narrative tension that authors or, you know, future world building folks, and designers can play with, which I think is the best part of doing this job, is setting up future folks to do even cooler work. Well, the set is doing really well,

so I have high hopes. One day we'll get a return and see more. So any final thoughts or just any final little tip that you had of an chance to talk about that you really enjoyed about Lorwyn, Chattimore? You know, if anybody is looking at the alchemy release for Lorwyn Eclipse, there is a piece of art that I fell in love with.

It's called Providence of Night by the amazing Justin Gerard. So I just wanted to give that a shout out because, you know, it's not often that a piece of art, you know, in the 11th hour, you know, after I'm basically done with the set, and I'm working on alchemy, becomes my absolute favorite piece of art. And so I hope people, you know, pay attention to that. Alchemy releases a ton of awesome pieces. There's actually a goat napper, the grand goat napper in there for folks.

and it's just a hoot and a riot and I loved working on it and just a huge thanks to everyone who's been having fun and playing the set and enjoying our return and I agree, I hope there's more returns in the future, Mark. Well, I hope there is. But anyway, I am now at my desk. So I want to thank you for joining us for this podcast. Well, thank you, Mark.

This is amazing. But as I'm at my desk, we all know what that means. It means the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. So I'll see you all next time. Bye-bye.