Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #893: Shadowmoor with Devin Low

Episode Date: December 11, 2021

I sit down with Designer Devin Low to talk about the design of Shadowmoor.

I'm not pulling out of the driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Coronavirus edition. Okay, using my time at home to talk with magic people, past and present. Today is a little more past. So I have Devin Lowe, and we're going to talk about Shadowmore. Hey, Devin. Hey, Mark. Thanks for having me back. Okay, so let me set the scene for Shadowmore.

And so what happened was we made Cold Snap, which was like a fourth set that we added right at the end of things. It got added late. It was kind of chaotic. And we were not happy with sort of how it all ended up. So I said to Bill, I go, Bill, next time you want to have four sets in a year, tell me and I'll make the year make sense. It won't just be a random thing thrown in.

I'll make it make sense. And so Bill came up to me and goes, okay, next year's four sets, make it make sense. And so I came back with this idea of two mini blocks because at the time blocks were three sets. So two sets were mini blocks. And the idea was there would be two connected sets that were large, small, both large, small,

but they would be themes that each set would have its own theme, but the other set would coincidentally match that theme so they played nicely together. And that the idea was the world would be one world somehow connected between that. And we worked with a creative team. And I mean, kind of a low-hanging fruit is what we did, is this world that transforms. And so there's the light side of the world, which was Lorwyn. There was the dark side of the world, which is Shadowmoor. So what is your, let's get you, where do you first get involved in this? In this timeline I'm explaining, where did you first get involved? Yeah, I was the lead final designer of Lorwyn

and was the head developer back in those days. And so I was very involved in that whole block and was a designer and developer on Shadowmoor. And very much enjoyed it. It has, looking back, some things that are great about it, some things that don't stand the test of time as well. But it's got some cool stuff, and I've got fond memories of it.

So the thing we, real quickly, just to set the scene, and then we'll talk Shadowmore. We kind of knew going in that Lorem I was going to be about tribal. We hadn't done a tribal set since Onslaught at the time, and people liked tribal, and we were like, okay, we're going to make a tribal set. And then we knew that if we made a tribal set, the second set could have those tribes in it, so

it wasn't hard to make the second set care. But when we examined that if we made a tribal set, the second set could have those tribes in it. So, like, it wasn't hard to make the second set care. But when we examined that, we said, well, what's a quality that the first set could just have that the second set could care about? And color seemed to be the obvious thing. So how do we care about color? And then meanwhile, I'd really, really wanted... I'd created a hybrid mana for original Ravnica.

And we used it, like, very sparingly in original Ravnica. I think it was like a vertical cycle, a common, uncommon, and a rare. But I really liked the idea of what if we did more with it? And so Shadowmoor was like, what if we... How much hybrid could this set have? That's kind of...

And because color mattered, hybrid did a very good job of making color matter, because here's a red and black card that you could spend with red mana or black mana you may not be playing the other color you know you might not have mountains in your deck but your swamp deck can now have a red card in play and so it opened up a lot of cool things for us yeah i've always admired how uh magic can find non-parasite mechanics where uh something that exists throughout the game and every set at all cards can be made to matter more than usual and so uh making color matters a good example that because every set has cards of different colors but shadow more has a

way higher than normal percentage of cards to say hey i'm going to reward you for every red card you have or reward you for a mountain you have and reward you for uh i have a bunch of cards that are all the same color because we've got conspire and stuff like that and so that'll play nice with every set that's ever printed but it can also play especially nice with shadow more in the surrounding sets because those sets are engineered to have hybrid cards that are more than one color but can still be easily cast uh and a lot of a lot a lot of magic mechanics like uh you know attack was creatures with power six or more or have a creature power four or five or more, or cast non-creature spells, that you see it again and again,

the nice thing about them is that you can take any pile of cards and combine those mechanics with it, and you'll find a way to get your combos off. Okay, so let's talk a little bit about the challenges of making a set in which half the cards are hybrid. We've bit off a lot there. Yeah, and the percentage of hybrid we've been off a lot there yeah and uh the percentage of hybrid cards

being giant was partially because some previous sets had the hook of the set be hey we got a bunch of gold cards but if you fan out a booster pack there just weren't that many gold cards in the pack right and so if someone say hey i thought you told me the theme was all gold cards or the theme of scourge was dragons there's just not that many you know dragons in scourge and so it doesn't feel like a dragon set and so so Shadowmoor was determined not to make that mistake, and they delivered a ton of hybrid cards, so you'd be sure to catch the theme and get a bunch of cool

hybrid cards, even if you just open a few packs. And a lot of the fun of making hybrid cards and of thinking about them is that you can find areas where the color pie overlaps and where any two given colors, either ally or enemy colors, have things they have have in common and so a hybrid card that can be cast either blue mana or red mana or combination blue and red mana uh can do things like swapping power toughness or

uh you know changing the control of creatures for some amount of time that can be attributed to both blue and red and so they can feel like they can belong in a blue deck or a red deck or a deck that's both. And so it's fun to sort of just get reminded that space of what do these two colors have in common because every single color has something in common, whether you're a designer or a player. And just for the people who may not remember,

Shadowmoor was ally. We did the ally hybrid in Shadowmoor and then Eventide, the next set, had the enemy hybrid. So there were a lot of hybrid, Eye hybrid in Shadowmoor, and then Eventide, the next set, had the Enemy hybrid. So, there were a lot of hybrid, but there were only five combinations in Shadowmoor itself. So, do you remember how we previewed

the set? Like, our first big splashy preview? Remind me. So, you came to the website, and there was a booster pack of Shadowmoor. Like, you saw the outside of the booster pack. Yeah. And if you tapped on it, it opened the booster pack,

and then inside were 15 hand-selected cards that had no text on them. All you saw was the frames, the art in frames. But it just, it said, hey, this set, half the cards are hybrid. And it was very impactful. In fact, and we also had one, we called it said, hey, this set, half the cards are hybrid. And it was very impactful. In fact, and we also had one we called Two-Brid, which is a hybrid symbol that's either a colored mana or two generic mana.

And one of the cards there was also a Two-Brid card. So, yeah. The Two-Brid I actually did make myself. I remember that. Yep. Okay, so let's talk a little bit about the challenges of hybrid. So what's hard about making a set with half the set being hybrid? Well, I mentioned how every color pair has overlaps, but some certainly have way more overlaps than others.

For some, it's pretty easy to make 10 cards that act in the color price base that is shared by both red and green, for example, but trying to find mechanics that are shared by another color pair. And it's hard for me to remember off the top of my head. Blue-black was our problem child. Right. So when you look at the allied colors, for example, white and green and red and black overlap a lot.

In fact, one could argue a little too much. Like we're always fighting to make sure that white and green and red and black stay off lot. In fact, one could argue a little too much. We're always fighting to make sure that white and green and red and black stay off each other. But blue does not play nicely with other colors. Both blue-white and blue-black, although blue-white is easier. Blue-white is more

overlap than blue-black. Blue-black is kind of the problem child. And red-green was fine. So red-green, fine so red green white green red black we didn't have a lot of problems white blue a little bit but not too much and then blue black was all sorts of problems um and i know what we figured out early on is creatures aren't hard it's not hard to make um hybrid creatures just because like every color has creature combinations you know most color combinations have an overlapping mechanic,

and we also were making new mechanics. We'll talk about those in a second, but, like, we could use the new mechanics, you know, like, you know, Persist or Wither could overlap on colors, and we're defining it in this set so we can call whatever we want. So creatures were a lot easier. Spells, especially common spells, were very tricky.

Right, and the kind of thing that a blue spell could do and a black spell could also do, they could both draw cards, but usually black is to pay life or sacrifice creatures or something, and blue typically doesn't. But finding those overlaps is tough. I remember that gold multicolored cards

are very popular in Magic, and everybody always loves the multicolored sets, but we can't just print multicolored sets every year. And so hybrid was an opportunity to do something like multicolored cards are very popular in Magic, and everybody always loves the multicolored sets, but we can't just play multicolored sets every year. And so hybrid was an opportunity to do something like multicolored, but not to go back to multicolored gold card well too often. And hybrid cards kind of look multicolored and have some of those attributes, and they're very easy to cast in a red-green deck, because if you draw all fours or all mounds, you can still cast them.

But they also can be used in monocolored decks, and so Shadamore also had a vibe of, hey uh what if you played monocolor decks more often than normal and it's fun to feel like you're getting away with something when you play uh a card that has four hybrid mana symbols and it's cost and it says you know red green red green red green red green and you play it in your monogreen deck and you feel like you're getting away with something because sometimes it has a little more of a red tinge than normally would uh but you're playing it mono green and those cards can be really powerful and pushed uh because they require to commit to either playing mono green or mono red or or just red green like a gold card and so shadow more even unlimited has

a higher percentage of cards that were to be monocolored and some cycles you're worth being monocolored and a bunch of you know triple hybrid and quadruple hybrid cards that were worth being monocolored and some cycles you're worth being monocolored and a bunch of you know triple hybrid and quadruple hybrid cards that were being monocolored and in a set with a ton of hybrid you can plausibly play mono black mono blue mono green uh much more often than you can a normal set because if you are mono blue in a typical set the number of cards in a pack that could fit in your deck is about uh you know 0.22 or something because it's a fifth of cards plus some colors artifacts and whatnot but in a carpet uh a set with this many hybrid cards you can play all the mono blue cards uh all the blue white hybrid cards all the blue black hybrid cards and a bunch of colorless cards and that's enough to sort of get you up to the threshold where you

could plausibly play mono blue and because it's fun to do something you're not supposed to do it's fun to take advantage of that and uh play mono blue and there's some rewards that say hey for island you have get a bonus you're like all right i guess i'll that's a reason for you to feel good about playing 17 islands and if you have put in you know crappy 23rd card to uh stay in mono blue then this is set where that can be worth it if you have cards that count basic lands count the number of blue creatures you have etc etc yeah in general one of the things for people to be aware of is, it is very, very hard in most environments to draft a Mono Power deck. Not impossible,

but really the only way it works is if I go in it heavy, and then everybody around me just isn't in my color. You know, sometimes you can pull that off, but it's very hard. And that Shadowmoor, right, with Hybrid, we just upped the number

of cards like it made the number of cards large enough that it's something you could feasibly do and much more consistent and so one shadow more shadow more shadow more shadow more it might be my favorite living environment because i i like drafting monocolor and it is the set where you just you can draft monocolor um which has always been fun for me and most of the time in most formats when somebody comes up and say uh devon i drafted totally mono blue i've got 23 blue spells this is so cool and i look at their uh draft i usually end up saying hey that's great you could go mono blue but your deck would actually be better if you played three black removal spells and then 20 blue spells right like usually even with the cards they draft while trying to go out of blue it is worth it to splash a second color but because shadow more has uh hhh meaning

hybrid hybrid hybrid mana cost and hhh meaning quadruple hyper mana costs there actually are some payoffs for going literally monoblue and not splashing you know four swaps or something uh in a way that isn't remote sets and. And certainly Throne of Eldraine that does a bunch of hybrid and does a bunch of HH, HH costs and has some cards that reward you for playing a bunch of cards the same color but lands the same color and tapping three colors of mana

to pay the mana cost of some guys that don't necessarily require that but give you bonus if you play three mana the same color. That also had a reward for playing Monochrome Theme that I very much enjoyed as a player in worrisome years. So real quickly, I just want to explain H. You threw that out there.

Yeah, I did say what it meant a moment ago, but just to say it again. I thought, I already defined it once, I get why I was saying it again. But H is a code that we would use in multiverse at Wizards to refer to what a hypermana symbol could be or use in multiverse at wizards to refer to what a hybrid mana symbol could be or using conversation and so if we say a mana cost is h h h that means it's three hybrid

mana h for hybrid and uh the hybrid mana might be blue black it might be black red but there's so many cycles in shadow more that if you say the cost of this cycle is h h h then it means the black red one costs black red hybrid black red then it means the black-red one costs black-red hybrid, black-red hybrid, black-red hybrid, the red-green one costs red-green hybrid, red-green hybrid, red-green hybrid, et cetera, et cetera. So it's- Right, a lot of times in R&D,

in order to talk about things, it's important that we have language so that we can explain things. And as we'll get to in a second, there's so many hybrid cycles in the set that being able to talk about the cycle, this represented a hybrid mana, and H stood for hybrid, by the way, that wasn't clear. But anyway, that was terminology we to this day still use. So let's talk a little bit about the cycling. One of the things about

multicolored cards, and that goes for traditional multicolor or hybrid is that we tend to design them in cycles meaning we don't just make one if we make one we make you know so since this was an ally hybrid set if we're going to make a white blue uh card we're going to also make a blue black and a black red and a red green and green white we're going to make all five so do you remember how many cycles this set has so i i have it in front of me and uh shadow more has 26 five card cycles which is just off the charts high i feel like it's maybe the highest we've ever had in a set uh the sets were pretty large back then 301 cards and i think they're not as large these days no they're not hard for modern sets to to to match that number um but there are seven

cycles that go across shadow more and even tide which is the sequel to shadow more in the same block and then there's 19 cycles just in shadow more and so that is a enormous number um it does help you remember what uh the hybrid cards are generally doing and it certainly makes it easier to design when you design a cycle that makes sense uh as a five-part cycle and then you're sort of filling the blanks of okay what is a green and a red and blue and a black and white uh thing for these elements to do or in hybrids case a white blue thing a blue black thing a black red thing etc yeah one of the things that basically happened is there was a lot of challenge to building a hybrid set especially with 50. And so because we had to put them into cycles anyway, we tended to make them...

So when you talk about a cycle, there's kind of what we call a loose cycle and a hard cycle, or a tight cycle. A loose cycle means... Or a tight cycle means they're very exact. Maybe they all cost the exact same amount of mana, except the mana symbol will change. Or maybe they have the same power toughness. Or something about them is very, very similar to one another. Where a loose cycle

is a cycle that is... Everyone has one in it, but maybe it's just a creature. It's much looser in its definition for what makes it a cycle. And we tended to do more tight cycles in this set, because hybrid is so hard to design

that it's a lot easier to go oh well we'll just take one id and float it to five cards it just allowed us to make more hybrid cards right and uh so many of the cards the set refer to color because they say for every mountain you control get a bonus or if you control a red creature get a bonus or uh spend a red mana colon get a bonus that a uh once we're talking about colors and land types it makes it easy to go to a cyclical place because there are five colors once you say here's two cards that give you bonus for having a certain basic land type it kind of makes sense to extend it out to five it's like almost a little bit weird to have one of that are a

curate that cares about uh i'm a red card, but I care about having forests. That's like an unusual one-off, but if you have a cycle of cards that say I'm a red card, but I care about a basic land type up in mountains, right? Red cares about green, and green cares about white, etc., etc. It's not set for that, but if you have a cycle of cards that talk about land types or colors, it makes more sense

because there's five land types, five colors. And in general, there's an aesthetic to how we do multicolor that people sort of like, you don't want to have more white-blue cards than you have blue-black cards. So that's another reason we cycle them. Yeah, the more recent multicolor sets

have been pretty structured also in terms of there will often be a cycle across a certain rarity and a certain number of mana symbols where there'll be five uncommon creatures that all have a white and a certain number of mana symbols where uh there'll be five uncommon creatures that all have a white and a blue in the mana cost or blue in the black or black and red right going around the colors that are featured in set the color combinations um or there'll be a cycle that says we are uh white white blue blue in the mana cost plus some number

of colors meta and then blue blue black black plus a number of colorless mana, and then blue, blue, black, black plus some number of colorless mana, right? Those structures have echoed across a lot of multiple insects. Okay, so I want to talk about some of the mechanics now. So let's start with minus one, minus one counters. Okay, so here's the story. The idea was that Lorwyn was supposed to be kind of the nice

part of the world, and Shadamore was kind of the mean part of the world. So I had this idea early on in Lorwyn, well, what if instead of killing creatures, you just, like, hurt them a little bit? And so we put minus one, minus one counters in as this, like, oh, I'm not killing your creature, I'm just harming it, but I'm not killing it. But it turned out that minus one, minus one counters felt so more vicious than not. Like, it felt so meaner that we ended up, said, okay, okay,

we'll use that in Shadowmoor because it feels so mean that it'll be on the dark side of the world. So we did plus one, plus one counters in Lorwyn, and minus one, minus ones in Shadowmoor. Yeah, this is a giant, this shows how old I am, how old I am with my magic, but

it reminds me how, like, the card Torture, which is actually from from homelands uh puts minus one minus one counters on the enchanted creature that feels like you're sort of torturing and weakening it and so that plays into what you're saying about how it felt even crueler than destroying the creature in some ways so what happened was when we had minus one minus one counters in lorwyn um i believe nate heith made Persist as a mechanic and then when we moved minus one, minus one counters, we liked the mechanic

so we just moved it there and Persist played pretty well What are your thoughts on Persist? I like Persist myself Persist says when this creature goes to graveyard from play if it has no counters on it it returns the

battlefield with a minus one minus one counter on it and so it gets a second life and the second life is a little weaker than the first life um and it's more powerful than it looks because you can get a creature as a three mana three two and it doesn't look that great but it comes back as a uh you know two one after it dies as a2, and getting a second creature every time you cast a spell is very, very powerful. And there's also a bunch of sneaky tricks where you can let the creature die, come back persisting with a minus one, minus one counter on it,

but then if you remove the minus one, minus one counter, then it's ready to persist all over again. When it goes to Graveyard, it checks, hey, do I have a counter on me? No, I don't. Oh, great, I'll come back to life again. And so there are a bunch of tricks in that set and across Magic where you can remove the minus one as one counter from the creature and it will uh persist back to life more times there are even combo decks and some of the magic sort of wider formats that have tons of tons of years of sets in them where you can

instantly kill someone by uh you know playing a card that says counters can't replace my creatures and then sacrificing your persist creature again and again and again, and it keeps coming back without a counter on it because the other thing says it can't have counters on it. So you get infinite sacrifice triggers, and you can kill them outright. I think, by the way, Shadowmoor is where the plus one, plus one, minus one, minus one rule came from. Right, where they negate each other. Right, so if you have either a plus one, plus one, or a minus one, minus one,

and you put the other one on the same card, they negate each other and go. So if you have either a plus one, plus one counter or a minus one, minus one counter and you put the other one on the same card, they negate each other and go away. Right. They explode. It's like matter, antimatter.

Yes. It's like if you touch your, you duplicate from the mirror universe. Don't do that. Yeah. And so, Lorwyn had plus one, plus one counters

and Shadowmour had minus one, minus one. So the rule came up to help simplify things because in standard they were coexisting. Right. But anyway,

persist. I think we, we literally was in the file from the day we started because we took it from Lorwyn. And I mean, I think it got, you know, numbers got changed, but it really didn't change during the whole,

I think the whole design development, other than, you know, numbers got changed as, as the developers started understanding how to balance it correctly. You're talking about Persist? Yeah, Persist. Yeah, and one of the fun things about Persist also is you can combine it with coming-to-play abilities,

enter the battlefield abilities, and it gets them twice because you play the card, it gets the enter the battlefield ability, it dies, you persist it back, it gets the enter the battlefield ability again. And so there are a bunch of Persist guys that give you enter the battlefield effects, and you can use it twice, and that feels super fun, right? guys that give you enter the battlefield effects uh and you can use it twice that feels super fun right you feel like you're getting away with something to get sort of double value not just out of the creature about the end of battlefield effect as well and so kitchen finks is like a card some powerful a lot of formats that

gains to life whenever it enters the battlefield and persists get it twice uh murderous red cap deals damage equals power at anything when it comes into play enters battlefield the battlefield, and so Persist gives you two cracks at that. Woodfall Primus is like some commander decks, and it destroys any non-creature permanent when you enter the battlefield with it, and it is a 6-6 that Persists, so you get a ton of value off of that. So there's a lot of cool ways to use Persist.

Yeah, one of the neat things in general, as you're talking about, is when you work on certain mechanics, it's like this particular mechanic worked nice with both Enter the Battlefield tracks and Death Triggers, so it just made you want to put more of them in the set so that it could interact with this. You know, and that was fun.

Yeah, and Shadowmoor is kind of like it's a dark duplicate to Lorin, as you said, and it's sort of going back to Lorin but changing all the rules and flipping it, and a lot of magic sets have done that since then, but Shadowmoor is one of the first magic sets to say we're taking the existing plane we've been to and turn it all backwards and so uh what was cute and cuddly and sunny about lorwin is now kind of sinister and creepy and shadow more and uh you know when we've gone back to mirrodin

sometimes it's had these uh you know poison counters and Yawgmoth's influence and everything. And we've gone back to Innistrad and had the Eldrazi's influence. And so there's a bunch of ways to take a plan you know and make it fresh again by putting some weird, creepy twists on it. Okay. So Shadowmoor has just a bunch of creatures that are echoes of exact lore and cards, but flipped to minus one, minus one counters, or some other way to sort of show they're twisted. Okay, so also with minus one, minus one counters is Wither. I think we were, once again,

we were trying to sort of make the creatures feel a little naftier. And so Wither, for those that don't know, is damage done by this creature is done in the form of minus one, minus one counters to other creatures. So instead of doing one damage that will heal at end of turn, I put a minus one, minus one counter on you,

you never heal, I've now permanently sort of shrunk you. Yeah, and that leads to very different combat decisions than not having Wither around. And it's sort of okay to attack into giant blockers when you have Wither because you weaken them enough that they won't be as effective in the future.

And I do think that that plays well, and Wizards has made some TCGs like Battletech back in the day or other games that have persistent damage where every creature's damage is permanent, does not heal off at the end of the turn, and that has a very different feel to the combat, and

Wither gives you a taste of that in Magic itself. Yeah, Wither's a pretty fun mechanic. In fact, Wither would later inspire Infect, which is sort of like Wither plus Poisonous. Yeah, and Wither, like Infect, includes that same ability, as you say, where if the creature does damage to another creature, it deals a damage to form minus or minus one counter

instead of regular damage. And then Infect also says when you hit a player, deal that damage to form Poison Counters, and if a player gets 10 Poison Counters on them, they die no matter how much life they have. And so infect is more complicated than wither, but it does sort of make sense, right, that this creature that gives permanent debilitating effects to creatures would also give permanent debilitating effects to players. And so infect is pretty fun. It's fun how you can sort of put buffs in the creature and you kind of get like a doubling of the effect, right? If you put plus three, plus three on an effect creature, it's kind of like you, you know, put plus six, plus six on it

because only 10 poison counters kills the opponent instead of 20 damage killing the opponent. Sure, okay. Let's zoom back to Shadowmoor. Sure. Let's say one more thing about minus one, minus one counters. I mentioned that it's fun. There's some counter manipulation cards instead that let you move counters

to other places, and you can move them off persist creatures to let your persist creatures get persisted another time, but you can also move minus one, minus one counters onto your opponent's guys, and that feels like you're really getting away with something, right? If you have a persist creature, let it die, comes back with a minus one, minus one

counter, then you put the minus one counter from your guy to the opponent's guy, or onto your opponent's persist guy, so your opponent's persist guy can't come back now. You're doing it all kinds of ways. There's this value coming out of every direction. So like you said, there's a lot of mirroring that went on. Another fun mirroring thing we did was the untap symbol. Do you remember the origin of the untapped symbol? It's Mark Gottlieb, I'm pretty sure.

Yeah, Mark Gottlieb came up with it. It's funny, I remember these things. It's been, you know, 15 years or something. Longer? Long time. Yes. So what happened was, we were trying to do mirror image of things. And so Mark Gottlieb said,

oh, well, what if we just do a mirror image of the tap symbol? And we talked earlier about how some things were successes and some weren't. The untapped symbol is a good example of something that didn't quite work. And the biggest problem was that two things, one people just read it as a tap symbol, even though it literally was a mirror image of the tap symbol. Like everything that was black was gray and gray was black and it was turned.

But just, you're so used to that general shape being the tap symbol, that people just read it as the tap symbol. And the second problem we ran into was people are very attuned to what tap means, and so you can think about it, but somehow

untapped just didn't work the way, like, even though it did what you would think you'd do, I guess, if you thought about it, but how to play with it, people really just couldn't wrap their minds around oh, you know, their creature attacked, so now it's tapped so now I have to keep in mind when I

attack that they have a tapped creature that can untap and it was just very hard to process. Yeah, it is very counterintuitive and even after playing it a bunch of of times it is very hard to get what it means and it's hard for the opponent to get what it means too and the fact that you can uh use the untap symbol to suddenly untap your creature during combat means that your opponent can easily get into oops i'm stupid moments where they uh attack into what seems like a clear board

but you use the untap symbol to untap for 4-4, and now you block, and they lose their 3-3, and they feel stupid, and so that is not awesome. Yeah, we really, we kind of said not, I don't expect us to, I mean, other than maybe a random Modern Horizons card or something, I don't expect us to use the untap symbol again. It just was so un-grokkable to

people. Yeah, I would not use it again either. The best things about it were trying to say this is backwards world, so things you know are backwards, and untap instead of tap is an example of that. But it's not worth the confusion, and if we could go back in time, I probably would not

leave it in. So, okay, one last mechanic. We're talking about things that I don't know if it needed to be there or not. So conspire. So Conspire is a mechanic that went on spells and when you cast the spell if you tapped two creatures of the

same color as the spell, you copied the spell. It was actually added, I think Aaron Forsythe added it in development. And I think he was just trying to get more color matters into the set. But Conspire is the perfect example of a mechanic, if I asked random

magic player, what does this mechanic do? It is not a mechanic that most people remember, it's a very unmemorable mechanic. Yeah, the name also doesn't instantly tell you what it does, which is like doubling spells yes, Conspire kind of hints that two creatures work together but it's hard to remember partially because the name doesn't connect to what it does very much

uh hybrid cards are fun to build decks with because you have to solve these interesting puzzles about how your mana works and uh they play pretty well and they're easier casts than a lot of other cards are but that still leaves something wanting in terms of what do they do in the battlefield no now we're fighting who if my cards are hybrid or not? And so we wanted to make that relevant. And so having a lot of color matters made that relevant. And there are some cards that reward you for certain colors. There are some cards that were especially effective against enemy creatures that are certain colors.

And some cards that change things colors. There's a whole cycle of thought-laced style wisps that change the color of cards and make you draw a card. Conspire was another way to make you notice and feel good about your cards being more colors than normal. The kookiest way to go about this was to play Island, Island, Island, blue-black hybrid card, blue-black hybrid card, and then play a card that conspired and tap two black creatures to get this conspire effect, even though you didn't have any swaps when you played these creatures out. You sort of felt like you were achieving the system in a way that gave you sort of tiki tingle. Yeah, like I said, kind of when I look back, there's a lot of things I like about Shadowmoor.

The mono-color elements and a lot of the color mattering was really fun. But it definitely was a set where we bit off a little more than we could chew. I think we ended up making some hybrid cards that really were gold cards and not hybrid cards. But I still have fond memories of Shadowmoor, although it's definitely a set that I look back and I can see some of the flaws as we look back and examine it

yeah it had these like demigods out of the five hybrid mana symbols that cost and were like super awesome that was fun the first gods that weren't gods right exactly it had this sort of like hideaway creatures um you know they had these had these like these these quadruple hybrid cost leeches that say

uh my cost is white slash green white slash green white slash green white slash green all my white guys get plus one plus one all my green guys get plus one plus one and so when you play hybrid creatures you know if you play hybrid white green creature as well it's white so you get plus one plus one for that it's green to get plus one plus one for that so it gets plus two plus two total so you can play mono green play this white green hybrid liege play white green hybrid kitchen finks and double buff the kitchen finks as white and green even though you're playing mono green right so that kind of like cheatery is was is more fun than uh one might expect to sort of like do little hyper tricks to get around the rules oh i almost forgot we're almost out of time here but i i

didn't talk about what i considered to be the biggest mistake and then this was on me uh the biggest mistake of shadow more uh is i made a decision to to take all the creatures from Lorwyn and color shift them. So, for example, the elves are green-black in Lorwyn, but they become, I think, green-white in Shadowmoor. Yeah, the elves have become more good. Everyone else becomes more evil. Right, and the goblins were red-green, and they become red-black, I think. The other way around. They were red-black and were red-green and they become red-black, I think? The other way around. They were red-black and became red-green?

Yeah, I think that's right. They were red-black and Lorwyn became red-green. But anyway, I made this choice to sort of do this color shifting because I was trying to represent how things were different. And at the time, my thought was, oh, I can make all the Lorwyn decks

have this added value, because now there's a third color that you could play with those decks. But it ended up making them less connected. And I think in retrospect, I wish I just kept things in the same color. So whatever the goblins were in Lorwyn, they were also in Shadowmoor.

And I think I was trying too hard to show definition between the two worlds and that there was plenty of ways to show the definition. So I kind of wish I hadn't done that. I agree with you. And to be honest, like I'm thinking about this set,

I remembered that decision and I was sort of ready for you to say that it was worthwhile and I was going to say it's not worthwhile. And so I'm interested to hear you say it now that it was worthwhile and I was going to say it's not worthwhile. And so, uh, I'm interested to hear you say now that you wish you'd done it differently. Um, I think it's, I think it was fine to add a color to existing tribes, uh,

in different blocks, like having the merfolk sort of be blue and green in Ixalan instead of modern blue, uh, is fine. Um, but switching from Lord in the shadow more, as you say, because we're going to exist in the same standard and you want to sort of build a deck and building red, green, black goblins is sort of not supported, you kind of have to pick and choose, it sort of

ends up just saying that the green goblins, you can't really play with the black ones very well. Hybrid does help a little bit, because you could play, in theory, you know, red, green, hybrid goblin in your black, red goblin deck, but it's not super optimal. We did end up doing some hybrid stuff in the center of colors that matched.

We didn't change everything, but it's one of the things, looking back, I'm like, oh, there's certain decisions that I had made as the head designer that I'm like, oh, that was just the wrong decision. And Shadowmore is one of those decisions. I also have a big question of whether Eventide was

supposed to be enemy colored, but anyway, that's not the Shadowmourne podcast. That's the Eventide podcast. Yeah, and one observation I want to make of the block as a whole is that Lorwyn was, like, especially kind of sunny and pleasant, and nobody killed anybody, and all the card flavors were, like, I mean, some of them were a little bit violent, I guess. But the set was a lot less violent than your average uh magic set lauren was

and the intent was to um sort of do that horror movie thing where you lull people into a sense of safety with like a little bit of foreboding in the first half and then you reveal the evil killer or the evil monster and oh no now everything we thought was safe is unsafe and it's all twisted and evil and those forebodings i have were actually signals of something horrifying right it was sort of trying to do that horror movie shift for Lauren and Morning Tide which was sunny the Shadowmore Even Tide which were evil but um what we found in retrospect was that uh six months between Lauren and Shadowmore was sort of too long to wait for that twist and during those six months when magic was sort of like all happy and hugging and sharing and Lauren and Morning Tide that was too long of being not

badass and not cool and not an awesome wizard stool and too much um just like being friends having a picnic and so the reveal of oh this actually is evil took too long um and uh we kind of like let players twist in the wind a little bit for six months being a happy friendly world and so more recent sets that sort of try to have like happy friendly elements like Throne of Eldraine has some like storybook elements but it's like storybook with an edge, right?

Like Throne of Eldraine tries to have a bunch of dark side, a bunch of sinners and stuff. It's more creepy than most fairy tales are and fairy tales are already pretty creepy

and so it doesn't sort of stumble into the trap that Lauren Mordenthal sort of stumbled into. It might be. So anyway, I'm now at my desk. So any final thoughts,

Devin? Final thoughts on Shadowmoor? I think I just hit you with my final thoughts, but Hybrid's fun. It's still the test of time. It's in a lot of other magic sets. So Hybrid is a success.

That was our first giganto swing at Hybrid after Ravnica had done sort of a little dabbling. We showed that Hybrid can carry a set and a bunch of magic sets have done that since then.

So anyway, guys, I'm now at my desk, so we all know what that means. It means instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. Thanks, Devin. Thanks for being here. Thanks for having me, Mark. And I'll see all of you next time. Bye-bye.