Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #603: Lorwyn

Episode Date: January 18, 2019

In this podcast, I talk about the design of the Lorwyn set.

I'm pulling my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time to drive to work. Okay, so today I'm talking all about Lorwyn, a set from many years ago. So this was a request from someone on my blog who said, I keep waiting for you to talk about Lorwyn, so today's the day I'm going to talk about it. So, okay, so we're going back to 2007. So it came out, Lorwyn came out on October 12th of 2007, had 301 cards in it. Our sets used to be a little bit bigger. So 20 basic lands, 121 commons, 80 uncommons, 80 rares.

This is before the day of mythic rares, so there were no mythic rares. So the design team, it was led by Aaron Forsyth, also had me on it, Paul Sodasanti, Brady Domermuth, Nate Heiss, and Andrew Finch were all on the team, although different people, different time. And then it was developed by Devin Lowe as the lead, Bill Rose, Matt Place, Henry Stern, Mike Turian, and Dougbire. Okay, so let's talk about where exactly did Lorwyn come from. So, to understand that, we have to go back to Coldsnap. So, Coldsnap was the set after we had done Ravnica Guildpack Descension. And then we decided that we wanted to do a summer set, a fourth set for the year.

And we had talked about a lot of things, but ended up choosing to do the missing, the last set, the missing set of the Ice Age block. Because Ice Age only had two sets. Anyway, it didn't go over all that great. And so I made the note

to Bill, because I had, as of Ravnica,, or as of, like, right before Ravnick, in the middle of Champs-Élysées, I had begun my reign as head designer. And after the Colesnap thing happened, I said to Bill, I go, you know, Bill, I think we can make, we could do a fourth set in a year, but I think there's a way for us to do it to make it more ingrained, so that it wasn't, didn't feel like an afterthought or something. It felt really like it was part of the year. And I said, so next time, let me know next time you want to do a fourth summer set and I will, I think I can find a way to ingrain it.

So anyway, two years later, Bill was like, okay, Mark, I'd like to do another summer set. Can you find a way to, you told me you can make this more organic to the system. I said, okay. So the idea that I came up with was, what if the way we do four sets in a year and make them feel more part of a set pattern is, what if we divide them into two mini blocks?

So had two blocks that were a large and a small set. At the time, all blocks had been three sets. So this was me proposing something a little different than what we've done. Obviously, if you know the history of magic, this ended up being a template, and we definitely moved closer in that direction. But the idea I had was pretty simple, is let's have large, small, and then large, small.

And the two worlds would be connected in some way. In some way, it would be a large four block set. But the four block set would be made up of two mini blocks. And the idea that I like best, and I worked with the creative team, was is there a way for us to make a world in which the two worlds were connected or they were the same world with some radical change about them. And so the idea that the creative team came up with is,

what if we had a world where it went through some change and it was the same world but the world radically changed due to that change. And the idea we liked is, after talking a lot, was the idea of doing a light world and a dark world. In the sense that we were trying to make a world, a mirrored world of you, a world of opposites, and so we needed to pick on something that we could do opposite, and light and dark felt like a pretty cool idea. So we knew going in, this was my idea of the two mini blocks, is that each mini block would have its own theme, separate from the other mini block

but that the theme would be something that the other block could help you with even though it didn't care about that thing so we were pretty sure we had done onslaught a while back uh onslaught had been my big push to try a tribal theme and it ended up being very popular. So we had sort of scheduled that at some point we're going to do another tribal theme. And the thing I liked about tribal in here was, well, the second set,

the second block could have members of that tribe. So clearly you got members you would put in your decks, but that it would be, you know, the second set wouldn't care about tribes. It just would have the tribe.

That's what I wanted is some state of the game that it could care about. And for Shadowmoor, so that was for Lorwyn, and for Shadowmoor, we came up with the idea of, I really was interested in a hybrid set, where hybrid was really loud and volume. We had done hybrid, obviously, in Ravnica, and I thought there was potential to really make it a bigger part of the set. And in order for hybrid to work, the color, the theme that really works with hybrid is color, color mattering. Okay, well the first set would have colored cards. You know, if you want to find a red card, well the first set had red cards. So we did color, we did hybrid with

color mattering. So those were our two themes. Meanwhile, one of the things that I would try to do is I'm always working with different designers to try to train designers because part of the goal in R&D is that the people with experience are working with people with less experience to train them. So the person who was under my wing at the time was Aaron Forsyth. Aaron showed a lot of potential as a designer and so I was working with him and he had led dissension and it was time for him to try a

large set. So Lorwyn was Aaron's first large set design. I was there. I was on the team. I was able to guide him. But this was his first time leading a large set. He had done well on Descension, which was a small set. And anyway, so he led the team. So the way, here's how it works.

We knew it was going to be a um a tribal set the other thing that we knew or i knew was i liked the idea and note some of these ideas i had did not end up being great ideas i will i'll say that up front i had this idea of having lorwyn care more about race creature types that were races and then having morning tide care about creature types that were races, and then having Morning Tide care about creature types that were classes. And that way, the first set would have all the classes in it, and the second set would have all the races in it, but it just gave you different things to care about and different decks you could build. Now, that ended up creating a crazy complex limited environment, so much so that it's one of the things that led to New World Order. But that was what we were doing.

So we had the idea of let's come up with eight races that we thought would make for cool, that players would enjoy building around. So we sat down. The idea was the design team and the creative team needed to agree. We decided that we could have eight, that eight creature types could fit. And so

first thing we did is we said, okay, what are the creature types that we know players enjoy building decks around? So we started with the basics, and that was goblins and elves and merfolk. I think, I don't know if we talked about zombies.

Zombies also fall in this weird place where they're not quite race and not quite class. And we were making delineations between what's race and what's class. And zombies are kind of both. So we didn't end up choosing zombies. We also were trying to get a lighter tone. Remember, we wanted light world and dark world. And so zombies, it just seemed a little too dark world. You know, it's like,

it's the light world with zombies. It didn't seem right. Okay, then we worked with the creative team to fill out the rest of the, like, we started with stuff we'd like. And the creative team was interested in the idea of doing Celtic mythology. That's of, like, I guess of Great Britain and Ireland, Scotland, sort of the

northern philosophy. And so the stuff that they came back was, is they said, okay, do you mind if we do, what if we do, like, fairies and giants and tree folk, things that have more of a folksy sort of feel to it. They also said that they wanted to do, they had this idea of doing elementals. And then the big question was, we talked about humans and decided that when we had, back in Mirrodin, we had changed to a race class system

for the creature types. Before that, you just had one creature type. And we started to have the idea of oh, what if we have races and classes? So you could be a goblin warrior, for example. And in doing that, we had to add human because before

the default for humans was we just put their classes. So humans were never human. They were just whatever they did. They were a soldier. They were a warrior or whatever. and so when we added that we added in human um we had kind of said when we first did it that we weren't going to make human we weren't going to care about human tribally um and now obviously and we would later change our mind on that inishrod would make human matter so it but at the time we just said just said we didn't want to do human tribal, and we decided

let's explore a world where there aren't humans. Let's have a world where the humans aren't there. And so, part of to fill in that sort of human gap, one of the ideas the creative team have had is Kithkin are something that had shown up in Legends way back when, and it had kind of been

Magic's version of halflings, creatures from D&D. And so they said, okay, since we won't have humans, maybe we can sort of fill in some of the gap of humans with the Kithkin. And so we put Kithkin in. Okay, so that meant we have elves, goblins, merfolk, Kithkin, giants, treefolk, fairies, and elementals.

So one of the things I thought was important was one of the sort of lessons of doing tribal was I think tribal works better when you're in more than one color. The problem when you're in Onslaught, the tribes are mostly in one color, is it really sort of, A, made it hard to draft because you only had one color you could draft. B, it made it harder to splash things.

And C, it just had less variety had one color you could draft. B, it made it harder to splash things. And C, it just had less variety of the deck you could build. That if you have to be mono-red, well, your deck is going to act similarly. But if you have a second color, you just have some choices. And now you can make a mono-color deck of either color, or you make a

two-color deck that involves both. And it just gives you more options just for the creatures and for the spells that you can include with the creatures. So we decided we were going to put each tribe in at least two colors. Okay, so let's walk through this. So elves, elves we knew were going to be base green because we wanted to make sure the thing

you expected them and they were there. But we liked the idea of our elves in this world being a little darker. Not too dark. Lorwyn was the nicer side of the world. But we like the idea that the elves here were a little... It's not... I mean, the idea in this world is we tempered things.

That the elves had an attitude and they really felt they were the most important thing. They were pretty self-centered. But it wasn't... They were not trying to kill everybody. They just, you know, they were kind of self-centered and full of themselves. Goblins, we made black and red. Red, obviously, because goblins are always red. And black, just because black seemed like

a flavorful place to take goblins. We had done a little bit with goblins in black, but the idea here was, let's really do it where people can start building black and red goblin decks. For merfolk, obviously, we wanted to be in blue, because merfolk are blue. So the second, one of the things we were trying to do was balance the colors.

Obviously, for example, elves and goblins, we had gone black. So for merfolk, we decided to go white, because that, like, makes merfolk a little, a little more group-oriented and a little more, just have a white sensibility to them. Kithkin were centered in white

because that's where they were when we made them. And we decided to go green with them. Since we had gone white with the merfolk, just go a different direction, go green with the kithkin. Giants, we centered in red because that's normally where we're into giants.

And we ended up deciding to put giants in red and white. Giants over the years, while base red have been in green and white, we've done them in different places. Just in trying to make the color matrix work, white worked a little bit better. When I say the color matrix is, we have to divvy things up

so that all the colors are equally represented in the creatures. Because let's say we put more creatures in black and less creatures in white, all that means is our black creatures are struggling to find spots, and our white creatures are all the same creature, right? So you need to balance them out. And we thought that giants in white could be interesting. Treefolk, we centered in green, as they always have been, and we ended up putting them in black and white. Treefolk were something where we wanted a little more space

of how to use them, and treefolk, like giants, tend to be bigger creatures. And we had done, obviously, we had Kithkin in green-white and we had elves in green-black, so we decided we'd sort of make three folk be our three-color tribe. Fairies, we put in blue and black. We needed them to fly, so it needed to be in flying colors, and we liked the idea of them being tricksters and blue and black,

making them a little bit meaner felt right. And then elementals, we based in red. So the main elementals were in red, but it showed up in all five colors. Elementals showed up in all five colors. It was something to help us round out some of the stuff. Okay. So once we had that, the idea was we wanted to craft the set such that tribal mattered in a cool way. So one of the ideas we had early on was what if we made not just creatures into, you know, for example, let's say we had an enchantment that made goblin tokens or did something very goblin-y. we had an enchantment that made goblin tokens or did something very gobliny.

Why couldn't that enchantment be a goblin? What if I made, you know, instants and sorceries that felt gobliny? Why couldn't... And so the answer we looked into this, and the answer is that a goblin is a subtype, it's a creature subtype.

Well, there's a rule in the game that says you can't share subtypes. Other than instants and sorcery, which are allowed to share subtypes that says you can't share subtypes. Other than instant and sorcery, which are allowed to share subtypes, card types don't share subtypes. If you're a creature subtype, you can't be an artifact subtype or an instant subtype or an enchantment subtype. So we went to Mark Gottlieb, who was the rules manager at the time, and said to him, okay, how do we make goblin enchantments

and goblin instants and goblin sorceries and fill goblin in for all of the races? And so he went to work. He said, okay, the way you could do it is you can make a new card type. And that card type would have the quality of joining together stuff so that it could carry a creature subtype. So if you made a tribal enchantment, now it would be allowed to have a subtype

that's a creature subtype. So you can make tribal enchantment goblin, for example. Interestingly, Gottlieb at the time said he didn't think it was a good idea to do, but he said it could be done. This is how to do it. And we decided that we wanted to do it.

Interestingly, if you know the history of the tribal keyword or not keyword, a card type it ended up being something we thought we were just going to make part of magic. We actually complicated text boxes for a while to do it and it turned out just not something

one of the problems was either you were going to do it all the time or not do it all the time. Like, either every spell that felt like it was a goblin was a goblin, or you just didn't do that. Like, it felt weird to, like, this enchantment that makes goblin tokens is a goblin, but this one that doesn't isn't a goblin. And what we found was it just didn't get used enough. That it's something that sort of took up a lot of space,

and it just wasn't something that... It required us to change how we templated things and it just wasn't worth the cost we just weren't getting enough benefit out of it so we ended up we like when we did it here the plan was it was just a um evergreen part of magic that we would use and um around Innistrad is when when I was trying to use an Innist, which was the next set that was a tribal set, and really had trouble using it. And I'm like, if I'm having trouble on a tribal set, why are we doing this? And so we ended up not using it.

Oh, so here's an interesting little note. So Future Sight, which was the set before this, I made a card called Tarnogoyf. You guys might know it as it's a pretty powerful card. It's one in a green for star, star plus one, stars the number of card types in your graveyard. The reason I had made that as a future shifted card was I loved the idea of reminder text that listed the card types and there were card types that didn't yet exist in magic. card types and there were card types that didn't yet exist in Magic.

So what we did is we listed two card types that weren't existing. One was Tribal because we had been doing enough work at the time. Like obviously sets overlap. So by the time we had to put the set off to print, we knew we were doing Tribal and Lower Wind so we put that on Tom Rogoyf. Also we put Planeswalker. So the original plans had been in Time Spiral that we, or sorry, in Future Sight. When I said Time Spiral earlier, I meant Future Sight of Time Spiral.

Future Sight had these future shifter cards, and Tom Rogoyf was one of the future shifter cards. And we were going to introduce Planeswalkers as something that was going to be nude magic as a future shifter card. We were actually going to do Planeswalkers as something that was going to be new to Magic as a future shifter card. We were actually going to do three of them. We were going to do blue, black, and green is what we were going to do. But we didn't quite get to a point when we have to hand off future site that we were happy with them, and we knew that these were going

to be important, so we said, okay, let's our time and when we find when we get them right we'll put them in a set so Lorwyn by the way was the first set to have planeswalkers what is referred to now as the Lorwyn 5 which was Ajani, Jace, Liliana, Chandra, Garrick all of which have gone on to be pretty popular Planeswalkers. And the interesting thing about Planeswalkers and Lorwyn was they were purely kind of added on. There was nothing about them that was organic to what the set was about. They didn't mechanically tie into the set. They weren't part of the story.

It really was just us saying, we want this to be part of the game. We introduced it. We introduced them with five. Each one was a mon-colored one for the first time we introduced them so that every color sort of got a Planeswalker. We obviously spent some time trying to build the characters. All those characters ended up being

obviously a big part of the story. But it was the original concept for Planeswalkers was it was something that we would do from time to time. The perfect example of that is Lorwyn has planeswalkers, Morningtide doesn't,

Shadowmoor doesn't, Eventide doesn't. It's not until we come back a year later in Shards of Alara that we even have more planeswalkers. And so it is something that started as kind of this extra thing. They went over so well

that we decided to make them just an every set thing. They became a big favorite of the players and now obviously are a big part of every new set. Ooh, what are the new planeswalkers? But they started as definitely more of a background thing. But anyway, there was a cycle of planeswalkers here in the set. around thing. But anyway, there was a cycle of Planeswalkers here in the set. Okay. Another thing that we were playing around with was a lot of other games play around with sort of evolutions of this creature becomes that creature, which becomes that creature. And we liked the idea in the set where, you know, it was creature centric because it was tribal. Could we do something where we messed around

in that space of some kind of evolutionary thing? So the mechanic we came up with is what we call Champion. The idea was it was a tribal set. One of the problems the way certain games do evolution

is card A becomes card B, which becomes card C. And it's very sort of locked in. And the problem with magic is, you know, we like it a little bit better when there's some variety of what can happen. Things always changing the exact same way. It's less interesting. So we decided to tie into what we were doing with Tribally.

And we said, okay, it's less interesting. So we decided to tie into what we were doing with Tribally. And we said, okay, it's a creature. When it enters the battlefield, you exile a creature you have in play of a certain creature type. So this is a goblin champion. So what it means is any goblin can sort of turn into the goblin champion. Through gameplay, what we decided was... Originally, we had you sacrifice it, but we realized that there was a lot of two-for-one-ing and stuff when you sacrificed it. So what we did

instead was we exiled it, and then if the creature, the champion ever died, you got the original creature back. Now I know in retrospect, the flavor was never quite great. The whole idea of this becomes that kind of didn't quite, like,

the creature exiling coming back, that didn't work really well with making that flavor work, so. One of the biggest strikes against Champion, I think. I mean, Champion, it went over okay. It didn't do great.

It wasn't hated or anything, but it wasn't beloved by any stretch of the imagination. I think the problem was we were trying to do something flavorfully cool and the choices we made to make sure that it played well sort of pushed against the flavor.

And so we ended up with something that was functional but lacked a little bit of a lot of what makes mechanics cool is not only do they do something that's fun to play with, but the flavor really reinforces what's going on. And I think Champion kind of restarted from an interesting place and ended up someplace where it didn't really,

the flavor wasn't holding there, and so, like, what exactly did it mean? Like, did this goblin turn into that goblin? But then if it did, what, when it died, it turned back? Or did this goblin run away to turn into that goblin? But then if it did, when it died, it turned back? Or did this goblin run away to go get that goblin? And then if that goblin disappeared, it came back and, hey, where'd he go? The flavor was never quite there. I mean, the gameplay was interesting, and there were cool stuff you could do. I mean, it did play into the larger themes of the set.

I like that. I like the tribal component of it. That part was cool. But it definitely was a little bit... I don't know. I mean, as we go through these mechanics. Like, Planeswalkers, giant hit, right? We did them.

We were only planning to do them every once in a while. And players were like, you must do this every set. Obviously, big hit. Tribal was mostly liked. I mean, I think players players liked the idea of Tribal. Microwe research, I don't even know, because it was a card type. I guess we must have asked. The problem was Tribal means both caring about creature types mechanically

as a theme and about the card type. So anytime we ask people what Tribal, like unless we're very specific, it gets blended together. So tribal did well, but I think people, when we asked about tribal, were more thinking about the tribal theme,

which people like. So I don't know what data we had. When we stopped doing it, I had people complain. So clearly there were fans of tribal. Champion was, it's funny. When you do market research,

what you find is there's three things that tend to happen. Players... Or four things that happen. Players can love something. Just love it. And those are the stuff you want to bring back. Players are just,

yay, it's back. There's things that players like where generally they're happy to see them return, but it's not as passionate. There's the dislike, where they don't like it at all. They do not like it. They'd rather you never do it's not as passionate there's the dislike where they don't like it at all they do not like it, they'd rather you never do it again and then there's the eh and eh is not good

I would sort of argue the eh and dislike are both kind of, I'm not sure you want to repeat that when the response is eh eh is not a, now sometimes like we did with Chroma, which was an Eventide where we, sometimes, like we did with Chroma, which was an even tide,

where we're like, oh, we think we executed on this wrong and executed right, we actually think players would like it, which Chroma later became Devotion in Theros. And that's a good example where the original reaction was, eh, and we thought, you know, maybe that was on us. There's a way we could do it and make it better. I'm not sure. I will say that champions playing in space, that maybe one day we can do it and make it better. I'm not sure. I will say that Champions playing in space, that maybe one day we can

find a better way to do. I do like the concept of evolution, and I don't consider Champion to be a very successful in that regard. Okay. Next. Clash. Clash.

How did Clash come about? Clash. How did Clash come about? Clash came about because we were trying to find something, I think we were trying to find something that was more casual, but that the more enfranchised, competitive players would enjoy.

So we came up with this idea of what if there was something where you didn't know the outcome? You know, one of the things we find is the more casual players enjoy higher variants. But so the idea was each of you would reveal the top card of your library. If you had the higher converted mana cost, then you would get an extra bonus. And so you wanted to win win but sometimes you wouldn't

and then you essentially were scrying like the card that you revealed you could put back in your library if you wanted to but you could put it on the bottom of your library so the idea behind this was okay, for the more casual players we have like this who knows what's going to happen

high variance kind of fun activity. And for the more serious players, okay, it's a way to smooth out your mana. It's something that will just help make better gameplay. Interestingly, the experienced players were bigger fans of Clash than the casual players. In that, I'm not sure what about it. Maybe it's like you had to process something and then you had I'm not sure what about it. Maybe it's like you had to process something.

And then you had to figure something out. And match it. Whatever it was. Clash did not go over well. Clash did worse than eh. Clash was actually disliked. And once again. One of the things we try.

We try different things. To sort of. With people like that. And this was us experimenting in new space. I don't mind us doing that. But. And this was definitely something, we needed something to go on spells. A lot of our stuff was very centric on creatures because it was tribal.

And Clash was just kind of filling in a void that we had. But, I don't know, it did not end up being a success. Probably, I think, the least popular mechanic in the set. Next, Evoke. Okay, so my idea behind Evoke was we were looking for

spells that were flavorful, but also helped you with creatures. So I came up with this idea of spells you kicked into creatures. That was my original idea. Oh, it's a lightning bolt, but if you spend extra mana, it could also be a goblin. That's sort of the idea. And

I really liked it. I thought it was cool. I thought there was, you know, it really was out of the box and said, ooh, spells you can kick into creatures. And then I ran into the rules. So it turns out that you can't put instants and I ran into the rules. So it turns out that you can't put instants and sorcerers on the battlefield.

It is not, I don't know, the rules don't like it. And then we looked at it like, well, what if it changes and then it's not a, you know, it becomes a creature and not an instant or whatever. And it just, it was very wonky. So Gottlieb, Gottlieb and I,

and I think we came up with an alternate. I'm trying to remember exactly. I remember working with Gottlieb to figure out a way. So the backup we had was, okay, so instead of being an instant resorcer that turns into a creature, what if it's an instant, what if it's a creature

that hasn't entered the battlefield effect and that if you pay this cheaper cost, the evoke cost, at end of turn you sacrifice it. So the idea essentially is do you want the creature and the spell or do you just want the creature? And that was kind of what we were doing before.

If you kicked it, you can get the spell and the creature or you can just have the spell. And so this kind of functionally did that. You know, it kindly, if you paid the you can get the spell and a creature or you can just set the spell and so this kind of functionally did that you know it kind of if you paid the evoke cost you didn't get to keep the creature so you weren't going to attack with it it's the idea you just can get it for one turn

and that that definitely I mean it I felt like it was a good solution with the problem it was not as sexy it was a good solution with the problem. It was not as sexy. It was not as splashy. But the one thing it did do is it actually ended up playing with the set very well.

Because the idea was, let's say I pay the evoke cost and the creature is going to go away. Oh, well, some of my cards wanted me to sacrifice a creature. Some of my cards, like Champion, wanted me to exile a creature. Or, let's say I have a spell that's going to count the number of creatures, so I get a counter for this turn. There are ways in which having that creature even temporarily

could be of benefit and be useful and sort of tied into our theme. So Evoke ended up, and Evoke was one of the more popular mechanics. Evoke is in the yay. In fact, Evoke is one of those things that I'm surprised we haven't brought it back yet. It was a pretty popular mechanic. Now, part of that I should also add in is whether a mechanic is successful or not or popular or not also can be tied to how many cards we made it with that were good. Like, one of the things that definitely hurt something like Champion is

there weren't a lot of, like, tournament champion cards. Where there were a number of evoke cards, Mold Drifter probably the most famous, that were like tournament staple cards. Like, of course you're playing this in a tournament. It's an awesome card. Now, part of that leans toward, it's a lot

easier to make a spell creature combo work in Constructed than a mechanic that requires you to have a specific creature type in play. You know, like Champion required you playing a tribal deck. Well, not everybody's playing a tribal deck. Some people were.

And it's not that zero Champion cards all play, but it just didn't have the standout card like Evoke did. And when you have cards that really stand out and people get excited by, I will say, a good mechanic can have weak cards and still be exciting to people if you have something exciting enough.

But having a mechanic, having cards that people really are excited because they're powerful goes a long way to definitely get people excited about your mechanic. Okay, next, Hideaway. So the idea of Lorwyn was that we were trying to make a brighter, happier place. Oh, in fact, here's a funny story. So originally the idea we were playing around with was, well, what if Lorwyn being the happier place, you know, creatures aren't being killed.

Maybe they're just being injured or hurt rather than being killed. So we tried this thing where instead of killing creatures, we would put minus one, minus one counters on them. And the idea being that here, these spells aren't lethal. But what we found was the minus one, minus one counters felt mean. Like putting minus one counters, it felt meaner than killing the creature. So we ended up moving them to Shadowmoor because we realized the minus one counters had such a

mean quality to them that it really, like, so we ended up doing plus one, plus one counters on Lorwyn and minus one, minus one on Shadowmoor as one of the ways to show the mirroring, which I thought was cool. Interestingly, by the way, Persist,

the Persist mechanic, Nate Heiss made the Persist mechanic during Lorwyn as a means of, you know, you can injure creatures, but they come back. And we ended up, when we moved the minus one counters, we moved Persist. So Persist was designed for Lorwyn. Okay, so Hideaway was called Treasure, and it was a bigger part of the set for a while. And the idea was, oh, it's a happy place and there's, you can find hidden treasure. And the idea was it's a mechanic where you took a card and put it face down. When you played this card,

took the top card of your library, face down, exile, but under this card essentially. And then under certain conditions, then you got the card. And we tried a bunch of different things and it ended up being wordy to write and had card advantage issues. And in the end we ended up making a cycle of hideaway lands. Um, so it got condensed down. Um, the one reason that we ended up doing as a rare cycle was we couldn't fit all the

words on the card, but, uh, and this is why we keyworded it. So by keywording it it it allowed us to sort of cheat a little bit and sort of give a reminder text doesn't have to be technically accurate so we could give the abbreviated version that fit on the card to explain what it did that's why hideaway is only five cards is one cycle but it's keyworded it allowed us like this is the reason we didn't do it all throughout this that. We couldn't fit it on the cards, but we kind of cheated to make one rare cycle because we thought they were cool. Okay, the final mechanic. So one of the things we

tried really hard to do in Lorwyn was give you options when you were playing, both in how you drafted and how you constructed. For example, I talked about how we put every race into two colors or more, two or more colors, to give you more options.

Another thing we did in the set was we did overlapping of cards, of tribal cards. So, for example, certain tribes, we made an affinity between them. For example, the elves and the tree folk got along. They overlapped in green and black. And the idea is, oh, well, the tree folk are, you know, the wardens of the forest and the idea is oh well the tree folk are you know the wardens of the forest and the tree folk live in the forest, okay well it makes sense that tree folk and elves would get along

likewise I think Kithkin and giants had some synergy you know so we built some stuff in, I think fairies and goblins had some synergy I believe we built in these connectors where if you were drafting one tribe, you could sort of try to splash a second tribe,

was the idea. But we were running into this problem, which was a numbers problem. Or an as-fan problem, to be technically correct. That we were running into problems of making sure that people had the numbers they needed to make things work um and constructed like limited limited has less cards than constructed limited has 40 cards constructed 60 obviously so we we were trying to find something that would help in limited and and if it could also do some supporting work in Constructed,

that would help. Although Constructed at least had other cards coming earlier that, you know, if you're playing a Goblin deck, Magic had Goblins before you could put those Goblins in. But anyway, it was clear to me that we were missing something, that there was some glue that was missing. So I thought back. So during Champions of Kamigawa block, Mike Elliott had made these creatures called the

Misforms. And the Misforms had the ability to change their creature type. You'd spend mana to change their creature type. So I came up with this idea of a legendary Misform that it didn't have to change it, that it just was built in. But rather than be 0 colon, because we were moving away from 0 colons, rather than free activation, it was just like, whatever it just is. Whatever it just is, every creature type. And so the card ended up being called Mistform Ultimis. It's very popular.

And one of the things that I tend to do is if I make a card that's very popular, one day I'm going to make more of that card. I know there's people sometimes that yell at me like, no, no, no, it's special. Making more of it makes it less special. And I'm like, look, I got to make hundreds and hundreds of cards every year for hopefully until I'm dead. Um, I got to make a lot of magic cards. I don't have the luxury of saying, ooh, here's a card people really enjoy. I better not make any more of that card.

So I had this idea of, you know, Misfur and Ultimis are very popular. What if we turned Misfur and Ultimis into a mechanic? We ended up calling it Changeling. And, you know, we were, the thing about Changeling that I really liked is Changelings could go in any tribal deck and it filled in for the tribe.

Whatever you were doing, Changeling's desk, you could play it. It just worked. And it also, remember we were saying how we wanted, we were saying, I was saying, that we wanted you to play one tribe but had the ability sometimes to splash the second tribe? Well, Changeling only reinforced that.

That if I have an elf treefolk deck, and I have cards that help my elves, and I have cards that help my treefolk, well, the changelings help both. It helps my elf cards, and it helps my treefolk cards. So it makes it more able to be able to splash the second tribe. So Changeling was just doing a lot of really good things for us. And,

the other thing it did is, it allowed players in larger magic, just to... there were a lot of tribe decks that people wanted to play for fun that the problem was we hadn't made enough cards in that tribe. And so it was hard to make that deck. And Changeling just said to the people, okay,

hey people who have your goat deck or whatever, here are more blanks for you to fill in your blank deck. And so it also had this sort of casual appeal of that it really just sort of reinforced. So anyway,

so we put that in. So, actually, I guess I didn't go over the last stuff. So Evoke was very popular. Hideaway, I don't think most people knew Hideaway was in the set. It was that rare. It was confusing. It was complex. There were some Hideaway fans, and I think one of the Hideaway cards, or two of the Hideaway cards saw the set. It was that rare. It was confusing. It was complex. There were some Hideaway fans, and I think one of the Hideaway cards

or two of the Hideaway cards saw some tournament play. So, I mean, there were fans of Hideaway. I think it's hard to be super popular and be only rare unless you're really, really splashy, which they weren't. And then Champion, not Champion,

Changeling was popular. Changeling's one of the mechanics I just, I needed to find the right place to bring it back. Like, Changeling's one of the mechanics I just, I needed to find the right place to bring it back. Like, Changeling's one of those mechanics that players love Changeling. It does a lot of good

both within the environment that it's in and outside the environment in supporting just tribal decks in general. So Changeling was quite popular. Oh, interesting story about Changeling.

So, Changeling happened late in the process. Like, we had really, the creative team had done a lot of work on the eight races and sort of giving them an identity. And so we came to the creative team and said, okay, well, we need to have these changelings. And our thought at the time was, well, you don't need to do any work on them they'll just always look like something you know like

you know well they're changelings so if they're on a card and they look like an elf well we know what the elves look like make them look like an elf but Brady was concerned that once you introduce to a world creatures that could be anything and you didn't know what they were that that really tends to narratively grab a world, creatures that could be anything and you didn't know what they were, that that

really tends to narratively grab a world. Like, if you lived in a world with these creatures that could be anything, how do you know what things are? How do I know that my friend really is my friend and not, you know, really, you know, my friend is what I think they are and not a changeling? So he said that what he wanted to do was that they would create something that could be a changeling, but didn't run into this problem, narratively speaking, of it could just be anything. So they ended up making these green, we joked they were jello mold creatures,

but sort of had a translucent quality to them. And the idea was that they could copy anybody's shape, but the nature and the color, you knew that they were changelings. So the changelings didn't end up being sort of traditional changelings where you can't tell what they are. You knew that this changeling was pretending to be something

but you knew it was a changeling as well. That the changeling wasn't hiding its nature. That part of changelings was not as beloved as the mechanical part of Changeling was not as beloved as the mechanical part of Changeling I think we did Changeling again we probably would try to I don't know

conceptually we might play around with them a little bit but anyway so so Lorwyn came out it didn't like we do out um it didn't like we do market research it didn't do super great

um the world since we've been measuring magic worlds Lorwyn I think was the second lowest scoring world um

we've done a lot of looking into that I mean part of it was it had some silly quotients because we were trying to make it

feel less I don't know dark and people slapping people with fish and things and I think some of that it had some silly quotients because we were trying to make it feel less I don't know, dark and people slapping people with fish and things and I think some of that, the tonal stuff didn't quite match there were a lot of little things too, the Kithkin creeped people out

and so the Kithkin which were meant to be kind of our human relatable characters ended up being creepy and not relatable and plus not having humans I think there's a cost to not having humans that we really didn't understand at the time. That humans kind of, I don't know, humanize a world and make it a little more,

I don't know, make it a little more acceptable for the audience. I'm not sure what it is, but the lack of humans, I think, played into that. And then the other thing was we were playing around with Celtic mythology and players know, like, there's a little bit of Celtic mythology people know, but the majority of it isn't quite something they know. I mean, Shadowmoor got more into the weirder of the Celtic stuff, but it wasn't quite as

resonant. Shadowmoor didn't do wonderfully either. It did better than Lorwyn in the God Book. I'm not 100% sure what it, like, I do feel that there's a lot of components to Lorwyn that done correctly, the audience

really could have liked. I think some of it is execution and some of it is just contrast and stuff. Lorwyn is one of those worlds that, like, I really thought we could do better than it did. And, I don't know, we spent a lot of time talking about, like, what are the nuances of things we did. The thing, by the way, I love about Lorwyn,

my favorite thing about Lorwyn, is the world that changes. Like, that part of it I thought was really cool. That the whole tone of the world changes that's my favorite part about Lorwyn and the part that I think is kind of the neatest part but anyway so the world didn't do particularly great mechanically

it did a little bit better mechanically but not wonderful people like tribal in general I mean the theme and not the card type and you know there were definitely fans, tribal has its fans and people like that

I think the problem was for limited we pushed too hard on the tribes and Lorwyn draft was really what we call on rails where you made a decision early in the draft and that kind of dictated your like I'm playing goblins. Well,

that means I'm red block, you know, and you know, there's certain viable things that work with goblins, and so once I went down the goblin path, all my goblin drafts ended up being very similar. And a lot of the things we had done in to get you to splash a second tribe and didn't quite work out

quite as well as we'd hoped in Limited. I mean, it definitely was there for Casual Constructed, but for, like, Limited, it didn't quite work out quite as well as we'd hoped in Limited. I mean, it definitely was there for Casual Constructed, but for, like, Limited, it didn't quite... It wasn't strategically the best thing to do. So, Lorwyn Limited got a bunch of knocks from the people who drafted all the time. In Constructed, there were some powerful individual cards. So, Planeswalker.

So, if I run through the mechanics, Planeswalker was a big hit. Tribal, a medium hit. Champion, like I said, was not particularly... It wasn't hated or anything. It just was ho-hum. It really was a lackluster response, which, for what we're trying to do, is not a good response.

We aim higher than lackluster. Chasing was actually very popular. Clash was very unpopular, probably the most unpopular. Evoke was popular. Hideaway medium. Like I said, I think the majority of people if you ask them what Hideaway was, didn't know what it was. Because you had to play

a lot of lower end. And not only was it a rare cycle, but it was also complex. It's the kind of thing a lot of people read and go, ah, whatever not only was it a rare cycle, but it was also complex. It's the kind of thing a lot of people read and go, ah, whatever, I'm not going to play that card.

So that, my friends, is Lorwyn. I think Lorwyn was, I mean, we learned a lot from Lorwyn. I think Lorwyn, Lorwyn is one of those sets where I think we made

a lot of mistakes. Most of them were interesting mistakes. Most of them were mistakes of us trying to do something. But, like, I chalk it into the set where we made a lot of mistakes

but we learned interesting things and magic grew because of it. For example, the mini block strategy, like, introduced the idea of having large

sets beyond the fall set, introduced the idea of blocks that were smaller sizes than three. Like, there's a a lot of in some ways the lorwyn block really paved the way for a lot of things like it was a very informative important um block but it wasn't the most popular block and so a lot of our lessons were doing things that people ended up not quite enjoying as much as we thought but But anyway, I'm here at work, 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. I'll see you guys next time.