As part of our normal design process, when a set is handed off from Vision Design to Set Design, the vision design lead creates a document we call the vision design handoff document. Its core purpose is to explain to the set design lead and their team the larger goals, themes, mechanics, and structure of the set to help them better understand the work the Vision Design team did.

In the case of Lorwyn Eclipsed, Mark Gottlieb served as the vision design lead and then was the set design lead for three months, so this document was created when he handed over the set to his set design co-lead, Michael Majors, but it happened mid-set design which is a little later than normal.

I've published a bunch of handoff documents over the years, as they're always pretty popular. Here are the ones I've previously done:

As with all my vision design handoff articles, most of what I'm showing you is the actual document (in this case, written by Mark Gottlieb). My notes, giving explanation and context, are in the boxes below the text. This document, like most of them, was long enough that I've broken it into two parts.

Topline

"Wrestling" is the return to Lorwyn and Shadowmoor. They are two individual identities of the same plane. Previously, they were mutually exclusive; now we see them at the same time.

As I explained in last week's preview article, the idea of creating a setting where Lorwyn and Shadowmoor co-existed was part of the very first pitch I ever gave to return to the plane, many years before the idea was actually greenlit. Because we had since made setting like Eldraine and Innistrad, neither aspect in isolation was as novel as it was when the set premiered. What was unique to the plane though was its concept of duality, that everything in the world could exist in one of two states. That was the core of my pitch, how to create a new set, and just one set, that captured the essence of Lorwyn-Shadowmoor.

Design Pillars

1. Lorwyn stuff

Lorwyn is considered the "default" world here. People will shorthand "Wrestling" as "Return to Lorwyn." Lorwyn was the first set in its year. It's iconic for its identity, art style, and idiosyncrasies. It centered on typal play, which is friendly and popular. It's the more mainstream set between it and Shadowmoor.

We spent a lot of time in early design trying to figure out how to treat the two settings. Were they of equal importance or should one take precedence? What made us realize that Lorwyn was (slightly) more important was that whenever players talked about returning to the plane, the parts they focused on were the Lorwyn parts.

2. Shadowmoor stuff

Shadowmoor is the B-side here, but it has a more interesting and unusual mechanical identity. There's more depth there. As the "dark mirror," it has its share of fans of its weird goth energy. It also serves as a foil to Lorwyn. Without Shadowmoor, it's a straight "return to Lorwyn," which would be more of a rehash.

Whenever we do a return, we like to take inventory of all the mechanics from the original visit. What the exploration showed us was that Shadowmoor had more mechanical elements we could riff on. Lorwyn was about typal themes of eight specific creature types. Yes, we would revisit that, but there wasn't lots of room to innovate on it. This meant that although Shadowmoor would have less as-fan, it would carry more mechanical novelty.

3. Lorwyn-Shadowmoor mashup

This version of the plane contains "gray zone" spaces that blend the two identities together. There are new design opportunities here for merging Lorwyn and Shadwmoor mechanics that could not have existed on the same card.

The gray zones are interesting in that both the Vision Design team and the Creative team realized the value of having areas where Lorwyn and Shadowmoor could overlap. When revisiting a plane, we figure out what new design space exists. Because Lorwyn and Shadowmoor were each their own sets with their own mechanical suite, there was no way for their mechanical themes to intermingle. Since we were creating a setting where the two sides existed simultaneously, this was an interesting mechanical space. The Creative team explored what it meant for the two sides to coexist environmentally, and these gray zones opened up great flavor opportunities. We were quite excited when we realized we both wanted the same thing.

Initially, this pillar was "Lorwyn versus Shadowmoor," and the set was split into mechanical factions like Mirrodin Besieged. But decks wouldn't play out that way. This concept was very abstract in a way players probably wouldn't care about, and forcing this separation was like designing with one hand tied behind our backs.

It was, in fact, this initial separation that made the design team realize that we wanted the ability to mix and match elements of Lorwyn and Shadowmoor without being tied to each aspect comprising exactly half of the set.

Pillar One: Lorwyn Stuff

Typal

Typal abilities are definitional to Lorywn. That's what the whole set was about. The original Lorwyn set had eight major creature types and leaned into them, and kind of went overboard. Lorwyn had sixteen cards with the word "Merfolk" in their text boxes. That is a lot! The major issue is not that the set played up typal, which we know is fun and engaging. It's that every Limited archetype was a deeply linear typal archetype. It was very siloed, and drafts tended to play out the same.

It's important to remember that Lorwyn had not been a huge success when it originally premiered. That was one of the major factors for why we didn't return to it until now. There are a number of reasons for this (it was ahead of its time in many ways), but part of it involved the draft environment being too "on rails." That is, you would normally choose a creature type in your first or second booster pack, and that choice would dictate the rest of your draft. Once you'd chosen Merfolk, for example, you became locked into being a Merfolk deck, which meant only a handful of cards were relevant in each booster pack you opened. This siloing also created the issue of decks playing out similarly from draft to draft because most Merfolk decks had the same core collection of cards.

Goals:

  • Focus on the eight original Lorywn creature types (Kithkin, Merfolk, Elves, Goblins, Elementals, Faeries, Giants, and Treefolk), though not necessarily equally.
  • Have enough typal elements in Limited to be clearly felt, but not in every archetype, and not to the point that the archetypes are just linearly "draft all the cards of a type."
  • Deliver exciting high-rarity typal cards to enable both casual and competitive Constructed typal decks.

Our challenge is to bring modern sensibilities to typal. For Constructed, we want high-rarity build-arounds for all eight Lorwyn creature types, including Faeries, Giants, and Treefolk.

But the Limited environment focuses more on five of the Lorwyn types in five of the archetypes: Kithkin, Merfolk, Elves, Goblins, and Elementals. The other five archetypes are not typal. While there are typal rewards in the typal archetypes, they are soft and more focused on each type's distinct gameplay style. If you draft the green-white go-wide deck, for example, your deck will be full of Kithkin. If you draft all the Kithkin, you'll have a green-white go-wide deck. This is similar to the strategy employed in Innistrad and Bloomburrow.

We talked about whether to equally weight the eight Lorwyn creature types during vision design and decided not to. They weren't evenly weighted in original Lorwyn, and with the need for space for other mechanics, especially Shadowmoor-themed mechanics, we had to be a bit stingier with how much typal cards we made. We decided to focus five of our ten two-color draft archetypes on typal themes, with Faeries sort of being a light sixth theme.

Also, since original Lorwyn, we have a lot more experience with typal themes. Innistrad and Bloomburrow both leaned heavily into a structure where typal themes are more about making all the cards of the same type play well together rather than leaning on specific typal mechanics for synergy (i.e., less cards that mechanically call out creature types by name). We would still make typal cards, but those were at higher rarities and aimed more toward Constructed formats.

At the Vision Summit, the set was much more heavily typal, and it was found that that couldn't coexist with rainbow, which is also a "collect permanents on board" mechanic. The result was reminiscent of Morningtide gameplay, where you were building a matrix of creature attributes (species and class there, species and color here). Vision Design chose to emphasize rainbow over typal for Limited.

Rainbow was the design name for vivid. In the Vision Summit, we were much heavier on both the typal and "colors matter" themes. Morningtide specifically cared about class creature types (creature types that are things someone does like Soldier and Wizard), so mixing those with species creature types (things like Elves and Goblins) created a complicated web that was hard for a lot of players to navigate. It was the set that inspired us to create New World Order.

The takeaway from the Vision Summit is that we should lean more into vivid as a Limited theme and make our typal themes more like Innistrad and Bloomburrow. The former would shift a bit during set design, but the latter would stay.

As a result, many of the current typal abilities care about whether you have a card of that type in your library (reuniters) or in your hand (behold cards), not just whether they're on the table. Very few typal effects below rare scale in a way that incentivizes Lorwyn-style "just collect all the cards of a type" drafting, though some of the HHH uncommon signposts are intentional exceptions. The team has allowed this at rare. We think it's a good throwback feel if this happens in drafts sometimes. It just can't happen in all the drafts for all the types.

We made a big realization during vision design that when we care about having a certain creature type, we could more often extend beyond just caring about it on the battlefield. Behold was a particularly useful tool as it allowed us to care about things higher in mana value. H, by the way, refers to hybrid mana. HHH cards would have a mana cost of three of the same hybrid mana symbol. While mechanical typal themes were more aimed at Constructed, we did want them showing up in Limited at some level, which the as-fan of rares in Play Boosters allows.

Leader

This is an experimental keyword ability in the companion-adjacent space. It lets you fetch one leader per game from your sideboard if you meet a certain condition. Leader cares about the game state, not about a deck-building restriction.

Example implementation:

Leader – 1B, Tap any number of untapped Faeries you control with total power 6 or more: Put this card into your hand from outside the game. Activate only one leader ability each game and only as a sorcery.

Goal:

  • Have a splashy, exciting typal element, primarily for Constructed

It appears on eight rares in the file, one per Lorywn creature type. If it sticks, there are plenty of rules and Commander questions to be worked out, and some of those conversations have already started. Early preference is to create a "buddy" category that includes both companion and leader as subcategories, and a deck can have one designated "buddy" total.

"Leader" was us trying a new approach at companions. Rather than requiring your deck to have a limitation in its deck building, "leader" requires you to meet a certain goal. Yes, this probably impacts how you would build the deck, but it doesn't require anyone making sure you followed some rule in deck building. Obviously, this mechanic did not make it to print.

Changeling

This is a returning mechanic that enables typal strategies.

Implementation:

Changeling (This card is every creature type.)

Goals:

  • Enable typal with cards that can fit into multiple Limited decks
  • Bring back a popular keyword that originated in Lorwyn

As I explained in my preview article, changeling was on the short list of mechanics we knew we were bringing back from the beginning of vision design. The largest question with it was actually an art issue. The original Lorwyn cards with changeling were seen by some as a bit goofy. Was there a way to capture their original look but make them a little cooler? I believe the answer was to make them a little less translucent.

Pillar Two: Shadowmoor Stuff

Hybrid mana

One definitional aspect of Shadowmoor was hybrid mana. It didn't originate there (it came from Ravnica), but Shadowmoor was "the hybrid set." It also kind of went overboard. A total of 110 of its 286 cards were two-color hybrid cards, which is a lot!

Goals:

  • Be the second-most hybrid set of all time (while still being far less than Shadowmoor)
  • Have hybrid serve as the mana-smoothing aspect of Limited play (see "no common dual lands" in the "Set Structure" section)
  • Leverage hybrid mechanically (see "rainbow" in the "In-Between Stuff" section)

Much like we spent time trying to figure out the right amount of typal, we also spent a good deal of time talking through how much hybrid we wanted. Fifty percent was obviously too high, but we also wanted the set to feel like a hybrid set and, as we've started using a hybrid a lot more to help Limited play better, that meant we needed to make sure we had enough to stand out from other sets.

Blight and Other -1/-1 Counter Effects

The other definitional aspect of Shadowmoor was -1/-1 counters. But wither as their primary use case enabled a grindy, attrition-based format that wasn't that fun.

"Wrestling" is a great spot for -1/-1 counters. Nothing around it in the release calendar wants to use them, and they're meaningful to the set concept.

Goals:

  • Find fun, constructive uses for -1/-1 counters

One of the biggest concerns in early Lorwyn Eclipsed vision design was whether we should even have -1/-1 counters. The very first playtest didn't have them, and it only took one playtest to sense that felt wrong. We then played around for a while with the set having both +1/+1 and -1/-1 counters. In the end, the reason we don't have multiple counters (it's too hard to identify the size of creatures on the battlefield, especially on another player's side) forced us to choose one.

R&D was not a big fan of -1/-1 counter environments, but we argued that it was something we should be able to do on rare occasion and a return to Shadowmoor felt like that was the kind of opportunity where we should do it. We did spend a lot of time understanding what type of -1/-1 counter gameplay we should avoid.

Blight

Blight is a new keyword ability that lets you put -1/-1 counters on your own creatures to get an effect. It's like a "sacrifice a creature" cost but sliced thinner. You can sacrifice part of your creature. There's a toughness parameter baked into blight; you can blight 3 onto your 5/5 or your 4/4 or your 3/3, but not your 2/2 or your 1/1.

Example implementation:

B, Blight 2: Return CARDNAME from your graveyard to the battlefield. (To blight 2, put two -1/-1 counters on a creature you control with toughness 2 or greater.)

Blight mostly appears in black, then red. The other colors can have a little.

It mostly appears in costs (additional costs on spells and activated ability costs), but it can appear as a cost within resolving effects as well (such as on ETB abilities).

Gottlieb hits the nail on the head about why we were so excited about blight. It basically takes something we do all the time in Magic, sacrificing creatures, and allowed us more exactness in using it. Blight stayed mostly a black and red thing, so we tied it to Goblins and made it a core part of the black-red archetype. Blight was the new mechanic that had the highest level of interest from all the various design teams. It did a good job of being something only -1/-1 counters could do but in a way that avoided a lot of what we disliked about Shadowmoor's -1/-1 counters.

As I explained in my preview article, Set Design decided that restricting what creatures you could blight onto wasn't worth the complexity or the extra words and cut the restriction.

Growing creatures

A fun cycle of cards from Shadowmoor were the Hatchlings, which start small but can grow if you meet a certain condition. "Wrestling" has a variety of cards that do the same. They have different conditions; they're not all the same like the Hatchlings.

Example implementation:

CARDNAME enters with five -1/-1 counters on it.
Whenever one or more creatures die, remove a -1/-1 counter from CARDNAME.

These mimic cards that would normally use +1/+1 counters, but the set doesn't have any +1/+1 counters. These cards can be harder to process than their +1/+1 counter equivalents, and they have a cap rather than being open-ended, but they can also be exciting because they have big power and toughness numbers printed on them and you get to stop caring about their triggers once all the -1/-1 counters are gone.

This is another example of something -1/-1 counters can do that +1/+1 counters can't copy exactly. The finished product does use a bunch of them, although more with them removing the -1/-1 counters through activated abilities rather than triggered abilities. It's interesting to note that Shadowmoor experimented a lot with new design space for -1/-1 counters and not all of it led to the gameplay we didn't like.

Destructive cards

As long as the set has -1/-1 counters, there are spells and abilities that damage opposing creatures by putting -1/-1 counters on them. The set is avoiding the wide-scale attrition of having wither as a major mechanic, not avoiding shrinking or killing creatures with -1/-1 counters at all.

The Council of Colors spent some time talking about when exactly it was okay to exchange damage for -1/-1 counters. The answer was most of the time it was okay, but you needed to be more careful in colors that weren't black or red. One of the biggest issues was aesthetics. Did changing it make the card not feel right for the color?

Healing -1/-1 Counters

White can heal, and black can remove counters, so Vision Design has been playing white-black as a "remove -1/-1 counters from your creatures" archetype. It doesn't come up in every draft and it's pretty linear, but it's been unique, fun, and appealing to a certain kind of player when it happens.

One of the interesting things about changing +1/+1 counters to -1/-1 counters is that it slightly shifts which colors are doing which things. Black is not a color that normally adds +1/+1 counters to other creatures, but it's best at removing -1/-1 counters. This helps the set have its own distinct mechanical feel.

No +1/+1 Counters

Vision Design tried having both +1/+1 counters and -1/-1 counters in the set as a clear way to show the dichotomy between Lorwyn and Shadowmoor, but it was too annoying for too many players. So, there are no +1/+1 counters in the set at all.

For those that might not be aware, here's the problem: My opponent has a 3/3 with one counter on it. It's either a 2/2 or a 4/4. That's a big difference when making decisions about combat. Okay, so just remember which type of counter it is. That's easier said than done when there are multiple creatures with counters, some of each type. We did try. Sometimes we make rules and follow them for years because those are the rules. We decided maybe it's not as bad as we remember. Let's just give it a try. Playtesting made it clear pretty quickly that it was just as bad as we remembered.

As we are halfway through, we are now at the end of today's article. I would like to thank Mark Gottlieb for allowing me to share this document with all of you. If you have any feedback on anything you read today, you can email me or contact me through social media (Bluesky, Tumblr, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter) with feedback.

Join me next week for part two.

Until then, may you find what part of Lorwyn-Shadowmoor most excites you.