Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1313: Lorwyn Eclipsed Play Design with Jadine Klomparens

Episode Date: February 13, 2026

In this podcast, I sit down with Jadine Klomparens, the play design lead for Lorwyn Eclipsed, to talk about how the set was structured and balanced.

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 I'd like to use my time at home mostly to do interviews. So today I have J.D. and Klumperens, who was the play design lead for Lorraine Eclipse. So we're going to talk all about balancing Laurel in Eclipse. Hello. Thanks for having me.

Okay, so real quickly, for the people that aren't aware, let's explain play design. When you get a set, what is it your job to do? What do you guys do? of the set. We work on it from the end of set design more or less to when it goes out the door. And our job is refinement and balancing. The sets and the cards make a lot of promises to players. Like, hey, you can play this stuff together. You can play elementals together. You can play Kifkin together. Whatever it might be. And play design's job is to make sure that that is true, that you have the right number of cards on the curve to make it work and that everything plays nicely together. kind of smooth out the cards that are there, make some small changes to make everything play

together, and then, of course, we are focused on balance, and we do all of this for both constructed and limited. Okay, so let's start with limited, because I think the set had a lot of challenges with limited. So one of the most intriguing things of the set, something we've never done before, so I want to walk through how it happened is there are, in fact, 10 draft archetypes like normal. all two-color pairs, but they're not equally weighted, meaning that certain pairs are drafted more than others. Can you walk through how we got there and how that works?

Yeah, absolutely. So yes, Loran Eclipse tried to do a new structure that was incredibly ambitious and weird, and I say tried because it's not super clear how well we succeeded, but the idea was that we have color pairs coming from the Lorwyn. half that we think are going to be the most accessible and the most exciting for the most players. People are going to want to draft elves and goblins more than they are going to want to draft the more shadow morey blight stuff, et cetera. It's just kind of easier to get into. And it's also more of what we want the set to be about. We wanted the set to have more of that

type of feeling and to have a lot of the excitement of the set coming from, hey, you get to play your favorite Lorwyn creature type. So our goal at the onset of play design work was to construct the format such as three-fourths of drafters ended up in the five typo archetypes for the set, and that the remaining one-third to one-fourth played the weirder stuff. We wanted that stuff to be supported. We wanted it to be there. We wanted it to add to depth and replayability of the set, but we didn't want it to be the main focus, and we wanted to make sure that when two people at a pod sat down to play elves, they both had a good time, and it wasn't like you can only support one else player at the pod. We are trying to do something for the first time. It is not clear it's going to go well, and it's really hard.

So by the numbers, I think we hit a little bit over of three-quarters drafters on arena playing the five type of archetype. alliance was definitely not quite where we wanted it to be, where those archetypes are clearly stronger than the other five, which means it's mostly wrong to end of drafting them if you are trying to win. So we missed a little bit, but it was a really interesting experiment. So another facet that's really interesting is that the five typo archetypes are not all the allies or all the enemies, but in fact, it's a mix. So real quickly for the audience,

White blue is Kipkin. I'm sorry, white blue is a murfolk. White blue is Murfolk. Green white is Kipkin. Black red is Goblins. Blue red is Elementals and Black Green is elves. Yep. So talk a little bit about that.

That's also something we don't do very often. Yeah, mine is between Edge of Eternities and Lorwyn Eclipse, and the distribution was decided by the Lorwyn Eclipse. Each of those got the Shockland and the set. which means the Edge of Eternity Shocklands, which came out first, looked a little bizarre and had no good explanation until you get to Edge of Eternities. I always enjoyed that. But yeah, so basically we got there off of choosing the types that we thought players would want the most.

Lorwin has a lot of creature types that you could support. Goblins and Murfolk are the big three. Classic fantasy. It's the most exciting. Players love them. There are all sorts of commander decks. Kifkin, iconically, uh, Lee Lorwyn, just something that we don't get to do a lot and we wanted to support.

Round it out with Elementals because we need five and Elementals are also fairly popular. And then we chose the color pairs in such a way that you get to the full colors represented correctly amount of times, but we wanted to more be true to how we have represented the types in the past than fit into a clear allied or enemy distinction, which is how you get into. It's just kind of weird hodgepodge where we connect all of them in a circle in a way that we don't normally do. So just to explain to the audience what you're talking about is we made sure that each color was represented twice between the five archetypes. And the thing is because we were trying to do Lorwyn, what Lorwyn did, Lorwyn kind of predates a lot of the modern sort of draft archetypes in the way we do it now. And so we just put things in different colors because we thought it was flavorful.

elves were black-green because we thought it was cool. Like one of the weird things at the time was the elves were the one people that went from being meaner to nicer in Shadowmore, for example. They went from green black to green light. So anyway, so let's walk through the five, just one went through each of them and talk about what you did to sort of balance that archetype.

So we'll start with white-blue with Murfolk. How did you guys balance Murphoke? So the Merfolk wall working on the set that was really hard because it gets art-dependent is that the lower wind half of the Murpholk tap thing, they have the convote cards, they have things that have input tap. The Shadowmoor half of the Murpholk have when this becomes tap triggers. So they're kind of playing in the same space differently on the two different abs of the plane. It's great. It was very challenging to pull off in any meaningful way because sometimes you want to flip the cards back and forth after we have our

balancing the merfolk was mostly about balancing I need to go wide so that I can cast my convoke bells so that I can have a wide board but also not having too much snowbally and introducing some of the trickiness from blue and trying to get the right amount of flashplay another thing that's interesting to point out is

when we do archetypes we want to have some of them be fast some be kind of medium and some be slow so there's a mix where did this one where do murpholk fall was intended to be kind of the second fastest deck. It's aggressive. Kithkin and Murpholk would be the most aggressive things you can do, share the white core, and the white blue, sorry, the white blue Merpholk deck is a little bit bigger and a little bit more relying on interaction than sheer

creature agro. Okay, you mentioned Kifkin, so why don't we go to Kithkin? So Kithkin's green, white, how did you bounce Kithkin? If we did our job in one way, they could all play very similarly, put a bunch of the type on the board, grow them, your opponent. We never do that because it's not that interesting and experience. So instead we say the Murpholk deck care about tapping and untapping, the elves care about the graveyard a little bit, and we differentiate how the different types play. But that always means one type gets to be the straightforward, make a lot of guys, grow them. And Kitkin got to do that in this set. So the Kifkin strategy is very simple. Just make a lot of Kifkin, grow them, and attack your opponent down. It gets to leverage

green big creatures outside them. Kifkin, the biggest balance challenge, was about just not too much snowballing, basically. It's really easy for those decks to get ahead early and stay ahead, so trying to kind of environmentally make sure the rest of the format has the appropriate tools to catch up and that the best Kifkin starts aren't overwhelming. Okay, so let's move on to Goblins, Black Red. What do you have to do for Goblins? So goblins was one of the harder ones to work on because it was trying to play with the blight mechanic. And the blight mechanic was intense. It's very engine-building.

It's like, okay, I'm going to assemble my guys who can blight. I'm going to assemble some guys who benefit from losing counters. The goblins were veering a little bit away because they were more about just kill your guys. It's fine. The goblins are in the trash. You get a benefit from it. but they can incorporate some of like the trefolk in the set that care about having counters placed on them so they can remove them. So balancing the goblins was a lot more about figuring out the strongest card interactions and kind of balancing around more of the combo nature.

Yeah, one of things you bring up, which is really interesting, is minus one, minus one counters have been, like play design in the past has not been very fond of minus one minus one counters. It makes it very grindy, like one of the things I always say is that you, You want the inertia of the game to make it end. And minus one-mino-minxon-mon-kinders often don't do that. So we want to talk a little bit about what we did differently in this time to make minus-one encounters more help the game end rather than just sort of keep things from progressing. Right. Put a lot of synergy behind it.

We said, all right, here is this blight mechanic. And we got to make a lot of cards that we don't get to make in the shape normally, in the shape of, I can grow, but I can only grow a limited number of times, which is actually a really nice card shape for play design. So basically what I'm talking about is in most steps with plus one plus one counters, you can make a card that says, hey, when I attack, put a plus one plus one counter on me. That's a fine card. It can grow out of control. It's kind of got some balance challenges if it runs away with the game. With minus one minus one counters, we get to make a card that says, I enter with three minus one minus one counters. When I attack, remove one of them, which means you're

this quest to do something, but you can only do it a finite number of times, and then you end up with the max size of your creature, with what's a cap, how far you can go in a very understandable and clean way for players, and that nuts just unlocks a whole bunch of new card shapes that are actually really good for play design. So I think this is the first time play design and like the last while has had a chance to explore minus one, minus one counters and think of the ways we can use them that are aligned with how we want games to go. I think we've discovered a lot of cool stuff. So that kind of capped growth was one of them.

And the other big one was just putting a lot of power in the synergy and kind of making it more enginey. So instead of nobody has any power on the board, because there's so many minus one minus one counters and the game goes on forever, we instead are in a world where I'm doing minus one minus one counters, mostly to my stuff. I'm using them to be very proactive. I get to turn those minus one minus one counters into stats, into card advantage, and then the game progresses.

Yeah, another interesting point that just when normally, previous times we used minus one minus one counters, it's been more an aggressive thing. I'm using it to shrink the opponent. But what Blight does, which is really interesting, is like sacrifice creature is an interesting mechanic, but a whole creature is a lot. And so it allows you to sort of sacrifice parts of a creature, which I think was really interesting from a balanced perspective. It just let us make a lot of different cards and not just different because they have the mechanics,

but like the shapes feel different. It flips a lot of the normal dynamics. It makes you care about different numbers on cards in a new way. Like often in games of magic, the difference between a two-tuffness creature and a one-tuffness creature isn't that big a deal unless your opponent has some things that deal one damage. But if I have a bunch of Blight 1 cards in my deck, all of a sudden it's a huge difference if my creature is toughness 2 or toughness 1. which is, you know, play design is always looking for ways to make P.U.

care about different parts of the card a different amount than you did before. And, boy, it was a great tool for that. Okay, next we're going to go to Elementals, Blue Red. Yeah, so it constructed a little bit for the first time. We executed on all of these themes for standard and for limited. Elementals is the one strange caveat, where the set was also going to have this cycle of Mystic Elementals. which we just saw a lot of at the Pro Tour and have gone really well for us.

But the fact that we are doing these Elementals kind of influenced how we had to approach the cards for constructed, because we didn't want strong, typal elemental cards that we might make to constrain this cycle of elementals. We felt that we wanted them to be really cool, and also, frankly, that they didn't need much help, which proved out to be true. At the Pro Tour, we saw all sorts of Elementals deck with just like the very small amount of real. estate we gave them, Thunderflok, kind of the highlight there. So the Elementals deck then, the limited archetype was the most divorced from what it was doing and constructed, where the standard packages for the other four types was very just coming out of what they were doing

and limited. We made a Kithkin agro package for standard. There's cards that plays very similarly unlimited. Elementals, because we weren't going to blow its limited themes out for constructed in quite the same way was more of a blank slate. So it ended up being the least straightforward, I would say, of the five type of archetypes, most likely to incorporate vivid stuff and limited. A lot of the vivid payoff creatures were elemental, so you could kind of naturally splash them. It got to play with a bunch of like trigger stuff, the signpost on common doubles elemental triggers, and it's kind of a elemental combo thing. I actually remember, remember like kind of midway through set design, my favorite draft I have ever done internally

was an Elemental's draft where I just was doing some of the most wild stuff I have ever done. Just so cool getting to assemble just really powerful triggers, copying them and doing pretty cool stuff. Okay, so the final of the typo archetypes is elves and black green. Yeah, real quickly, a little behind the scenes before we get to the play design part of it. Yes. When we did our vision design, we first did our run-through. I think we made an allied color. Originally, we had like allied color, and we didn't have elves.

Because elves have to be black-green. That's just so iconic to Lorwyn. And then at some point we're like, okay, we have to do elves. And that's how we got to the non, you know, the ally and enemy mix. So, okay, how do we, how do you balance elves? Graveyard, which means they were kind of working with goblins. You get that, like, sacrifice slash graveyard through line in black that plays really nicely and helps us make some bridge cards,

which can be really challenging to make 4aS, make cards that'll play well in either of the archetypes of the color. Elvis were mostly about getting the right amount of graveyard enabling and payoff. One of the stronger decks in the format. Okay, so that's the five typal archetypes. So now let's get into the five non-typal archetypes. Now, I'll start with the first one that I'll say is a little bit of typal archetype, which is blue black.

So let's talk about blue black. And also, when we bring it up, Ferries is really interesting in that we didn't go full out on fairies, but Ferries is an element of what's going on Blue Black. So how did you balance that? I think Blue Black was that it was going to be fairies, 10-point font, and Flash in 14-point font, if you will. It's got fairies backing it up, but it is predominantly a flash-based deck. Main challenge is there, and the reasons to do this is if you make a Ferries deck, it becomes a flying typel deck,

and flying typogell decks are kind of notoriously hard for us, not that fun, either your opponent is blocking all your stuff, you're not doing anything, or you are running away with the game with no interaction. So we always try and make sure that it's a little bit, not quite that. Okay, so the next two I want to talk about is the next two archetypes are kind of, there's connectivity between them. So there's the two vivid archetypes and the two, I don't know, minus one, minus one archetypes.

what it went further, but let's start with the vivid. So red green and green blue, both tie into vivid in different ways. Yeah, so vivid was a really weird one to work on. So vivid, if you just read what the cards say, control permanence of different colors, you go, cool, I'm playing a five-color deck. That's not really what we wanted you to do. The set doesn't have common dual lands. It has only two land cyclers. We were trying to very intentionally not let Vivid be just a clean, play five colors. There's some of that. If you're really heavily based green, you can play. There's a two-man-a, mana creature that adds mana of any color. There's really good manna fixing in green, but it's very hard to play a super multicolored deck that isn't base green. But the idea with Vivid

was to not force you to play all the colors of mana and instead get your bonuses off of hybrid things, that you would fill your deck with a bunch of cards that you can get a white permanent on the board with only black manna with the black white hybrid card and stuff like that, and also changing the cards so that even if you only have three on the field, the vivid reward is still very good. So there's definitely some blending between the vivid archetypes. It was going to be hard to separate. completely any

decks into two color pairs that so badly wants to play multiple colors. So it's not, like the vivid decks mostly are like one deck, you're just kind of green and vivid and splash and they kind of blend together a bit. Okay, so the other two

archetypes, oh, before we get to the last two archetypes, something you brought up, I just wanted to question about, working with hybrid. Hybrid is something we've been doing more and more with Unlimited. Do you want to talk a little bit about sort of the what hybrid does for a limited environment? But in terms of limited, it is much closer to a half-color card when you do single-tip,

which means it is a great tool for cards that let you bridge and stay flexible in the draft, which is something lower-in-a-clipsed as a predominantly typo set really needed. So we have this cycle of hybrids changelings at common that were really intended with, hey, these are cards you can take that will probably make your deck. even if you have to shift lanes. They're surprisingly close to being colorless cards in terms of how open you can be with them, which is just a really powerful tool for limited.

And of course, hybrid is very flexible. We can also make hybrid cards that are very tip-intensive that then function as two-color cards, basically, or monocolor cards, but you can't really splash one triple-H cards into a deck that is not both of those colors. Okay, so let's get into. the final two archetypes, which is white black and red white. So talk about, I mean,

they're their own archetypes, but they have some connection to them. So let's walk through them. A bit as well. We thought of them as Blight Engine was kind of the words we used internally, just the idea that you would be assembling a bunch of creatures at Blight, assembling a bunch of ways to take the counters off, and it would be kind of this very grindy, enginey gameplay, where you put creatures on board, put counters on them, took counters off them, kind of went up and down the chain a little bit there. They were really fun internally, definitely challenging to balance, kind of like how much

manner are we charging you to blight, what are the strongest ways to blight, what are the strongest enablers, its own ecosystem in a lot of ways that you have to figure out what's the best inputs, what are the best outputs. And how does white black and red white differ? I mean, obviously they blend some. Yeah, a lot of its outputs were size or like your creatures can't block or my creatures gain flying. And black white was more grindy.

It's like recur my stuff, keep going. In practice, it definitely goes into you play Mardu a lot and play all three of the colors. But yeah, that was the idea. Okay, so we've spent, so the tent archetypes mostly are a little more limited fall. focused than they are constructed focus. So let's talk a little bit about what exactly, what did, what did you prepare for Lorbin as a constructed shot? Real quickly for the audience, we don't definitively know what will or won't happen. We just can say, here are ideas. Maybe it'll take off. Maybe it won't. We can do percentages and things. But if we design

something that we 100% know how to work, you guys figure it out in two seconds. So, like what were the different things that you prepared that maybe would be? relevant for constructed? Two ways. Like first we want the set to have interesting standard cards. We want cards to matter. We don't want players to see a bunch of cards from Lorraine Eclipse that are cool, but nothing that speaks to them in standard or nothing that ends up being strong enough for standards. So we definitely want content. And then the other thing we think about is if you are a player who loves Lorwyn Eclipse, what is the standard deck from Lorwyn Eclipse that you're going to want to play in standard. So we go, okay, I think there's going to be people who really like elves

who want to play the elf cards. We need to make sure that it's possible for them. So these decks don't always end up incredibly strong, but we want to make sure they're functional, something that you could take the F&M and have a good time, and sometimes they will hit higher than that. For instance, there are some Rudy-Lorwin-focused Elemental's deck that did very well at the ProTor that we set up for them. It has a lot of cool, innovative deck buildings. There's a lot of ways you can do a lot of connection to pass sets, but it was important that we make sure that there are the tools in the set to get you to go down that path and explore what there is to offer. So the main things for constructed in the set, we worked on all of the main creature types except for elementals as just several

rairs aimed at strategies play in. They've all got to, well, not all of them, but elves and gobbels. and got to hook into some of the foundations cards, which was really cool because we set up some elf-typele and goblin typo cards in foundations. And yeah, just trying to get those decks to make sense. You have enough cards. You're not like, wow, I would really want to play elves, but there's not enough two drops. So just kind of make sure all the gaps are plugged.

And then we did the Mystic Elementals, which we wanted to be individual cool cards, variety of strategies support different two-color decks that aren't supported by the main creature types, a small handful of open-ended elemental typo cards that might tie into them and see where that goes. And then, of course, just kind of strong individual cards like Fremittable Speaker and just content like that. Okay, Firmitable Speaker. That is the World Championship Card. Yeah, so it is a two and a green for a two-four elf druid as a creature.

When this creature enters, you may discard a card. If you do, search your library for a creature card, reveal it. Put it into your hand and then shuffle. And one tap, you can untape another target permanent. Yeah. And this was the World Championship. Yeah, it's always fun to work on. We work pretty closely with the World Champion to tell us what kind of card they want and figure it out.

and generally want them to be able to show up, and this one definitely did. So yeah, a blend of cool individual cards, packages, get them all to work nicely and be well-supported. So one of the things you've talked about, there's a cycle of elementals that bring back a mechanic from original Lorwyn, which was Evoke. What was the like balancing Evoke? We've seen all sorts of just very powers like evoke my card and blanket in response and get to keep my big creature and get its ETB twice. So making new evoke cards is really tough because we need to find the right balance of this is powerful. We are not betraying your expectations on that this mechanic is strong and that it kind of lives up to the previous things that we're going on. But also, for standard, we don't super want the gameplay to be turn one, play my elemental blanket,

have this huge creature and kind of crush what's going on for my opponent to blend together nicely with hard. The set design team came up with this, frankly, genius structure of the hybrid about cost and then different effects, so that when you pay the full mana cost of the card, you get two effects. When you play it cheaper on the curve, you get one effect. It worked super well. We patched out the blink stuff a little bit by writing if you cast it on the cart. Oh, sorry, getting confusing myself in design parlance. Because it cares about the mana spent, you don't actually get any rewards if you blink it.

So you just get the creature, which is a lot easier for us to balance around. It's been really cool to see. They worked out incredibly well. they're showing up in standard people are still doing some of the blink or not dead after all stuff to get the creatures in play but it's had a much more appropriate for standard rate took a ton of effort from the team we spent so much time on those cards but i'm really happy with where they landed okay we're almost done here so is there any other elements that you were really proud of of just individual things you you did for loren eclipse

main talked about it's like a mega cycle of stuff it's like hey you're a typo-plus these aren't the types for you. You kind of want to have that type of fun, but you're not super into the Lorwyn type. We did it this cycle of cards that is just kind of, hey, choose your creature type. And I think that stuff is really cool content. It's not necessarily great and standard,

but I think it is a really nice way to make sure that all typele players are having a good time when we do a typel set. Well, I want to thank you so much for being with us, Jadine. This was very fun. And I hope the audience learned a lot about the inner workings of write a balance of magic set. So everybody else, I am at my desk, so we all know what that means.

It means it's 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.