Playing to Lorwyn, Part 1
When I return from the winter break, I will start with Lorwyn Eclipsed previews. So, before the end of the year, I thought I would spend the last two weeks of this year going back and telling the story of how the Lorwyn block came to be. As a Magic historian, I love looking back and being able to tell stories of the past with modern context. That's what this two-part series is all about.
In from the Coldsnap
This story actually begins two years before we even started working on Lorwyn. At the time, here's how the Magic schedule worked. (Note that I'm using the Northern Hemisphere for all my seasons.) In the fall, we had a large set that would begin the newest block. In the winter, we released the second set in the block which was always a small set. Then, in the spring, we would release the third set in the block, which was also always a small set. Every other summer, we would release a core set, which was always a large set of reprints.
This meant Magic's release schedule would jump back and forth between three main sets and four main sets. We did have other products, like Duel Decks and From the Vault, but actual supplementary sets were still a rarity at this time. For a business, you want your years to be roughly even from a financial standpoint, so the vacillation between three and four sets was a constant thorn in the side of Magic's Brand team, which ran the business side of things.
Bill Rose, the vice president of R&D at the time, would constantly chat with the Brand team about what sets we should be making. We were working on the products that would release in 2006, so my guess is this conversation was around 2004.
I'd recently become head designer. The 2005–2006 block was the Ravnica: City of Guilds block. We'd planned for 2006 to have three sets: Guildpact, Dissension, and Time Spiral. Since 2005 had a core set, there wasn't another one planned until 2007. Six months earlier, Bill had talked to the Brand team about whether we wanted a fourth set in 2006, and they decided they didn't. Then, in August 2004, Bill told me, "Brand has changed their mind. They'd like a fourth set."
We were already knee-deep in the Time Spiral block. Bill had asked six months earlier because that's when we would have started a fourth set. So, we scrambled and designed one. We talked about making a fourth set in the Ravnica: City of Guilds block that would have stuff for all ten guilds, but we decided it didn't really fit with how we'd created the block. Instead, we chose to make a small standalone set.
This set was, of course, Coldsnap. Inspired by lost episodes of old television shows, we created a fictional story about the lost third set of the Ice Age block. Ice Age came out in the summer of 1994 and was designed as a large standalone set. To create more continuity between sets, R&D decided to have the same team—Skaff Elias, Jim Lin, Dave Petty, and Chris Page; known as the East Coast Playtesters—design the next set. They would then flavor it as an expansion to Ice Age, although the set had not been designed as such. The next large set, Mirage, would begin the blocks as we know them.
That meant Ice Age was sort of a block, but oddly only had a large set and a small set. That felt like the perfect place for a "missing" Magic set. We created a tongue-in-cheek story about how we had found the set in an old file cabinet and cleaned it up. The set had a very condensed design time of one month but a normal development time. Coldsnap ended up being a bit lackluster as a set. It stood out like a sore thumb. It didn't really feel like it belonged. The important part for this story is that I went up to Bill after the design of Coldsnap was finished and said, "The next time we need a fourth set in a year, talk to me. I'll build it into the block."
About a year later, when we were in early talks about the Lorwyn block, Bill came up to me and said, "Okay, this block needs four sets. I'm curious what you'll come up with."
Two-by-Four
I realized that just having a large set and three small sets in the same world wouldn't work, so I started thinking outside the box. I brainstormed a lot of ideas, but the one I was enamored with was the idea of doing two small mini-blocks, each made up of one large set and one small set. For the longer version of this story, you can read my "Two Plus Two" article.
I talked with Brady Dommermuth, who was the lead of the Creative team, and we came up with the idea of a world that went through a radical change. We liked playing with the concept of duality, so we started with the lowest-hanging fruit—light and dark. What if the first set was the world all sunny and kind, but it turned into a world that was all dark and mean in the following set? We put the shadow world second, because, at the time, Magic's core sensibility was a bit darker, and we knew a transition from light to dark would be an easier sell internally.
At the time, every block had a core mechanical hook, and we had scheduled Lorwyn to be a typal block. The Onslaughtblock was our first attempt at a typal block, and it went well, so we decided it was time to revisit it. Because I wanted the two mini-blocks to have their own identities, I wanted them to each have a different mechanical theme while still working well with the other mini-block.
Typal played well into this. The first mini-block would mechanically care about creature types. The second mini-block would have the same creature types, but it wouldn't have cards that mechanically cared about them. That way, you could build a typal deck when Lorwyn came out and have cards to add when Shadowmoor came out. We just needed another theme that played into basic Magic components.
We eventually found the solution. During early Ravnica: City of Guilds design, I came up with hybrid mana to explore a different execution of multicolor. A traditional multicolor card would be the combination of two colors, red and green, but hybrid played in the overlapping space between the two colors, red or green. I really liked how hybrid played, so I put it into the second mini-block.
When I handed off the Ravnica: City of Guilds file to development, they took the hybrid cards out of the file. The set had a lot going on, and they were trying to streamline it. Because I was so excited for hybrid mana, I looked for a way to introduce it in the next set, Time Spiral. The flavor revolved around time being so messed up that it affected the mana. The Ravnica: City of Guilds Development team eventually decided they would like to put hybrid mana back in the file, so I took it out of Time Spiral. When Ravnica: City of Guilds released, hybrid mana was the highest-rated mechanical element in the set.
We often group mechanics by splash and function. Splash means the mechanic will draw people's attention to it. When people talk about the set, splashy mechanics are usually what creates the most buzz and discussion. Function means the mechanic helps the set play well. Functional mechanics often don't draw a lot of attention to themselves but are crucial to making the set work. Some mechanics are capable of being splashy and functional. The trick is to make their first appearance splashy and their later appearances functional.
Hybrid mana is a great example of this. The first time you see a hybrid card, it grabs your attention. It has new mana symbols you've never seen before and a new frame. It showcases a concept—multicolor—in a new way. It uses "or" instead of "and" logic. Ravnica: City of Guilds used hybrid mana as a splashy mechanic. It doesn't appear in large volume, just a vertical cycle in each guild, and is mostly an opportunity for something new.
I was very fascinated by what we could do with hybrid mana as a functional mechanic. Thinking about this got us to our Shadowmoor theme. Lorwyn involved caring about something organic to Magic cards: creature types. Shadowmoor could do something similar for Magic's colors. One of the interesting things about hybrid mana is that although it only requires you to have one color to play it, the card is both colors in all zones. That means you can play a mono-red deck with just Mountains yet still care about having a black card.
This all is a long-winded way of saying we were excited by the idea of "colors matter" being the core mechanical theme of Shadowmoor. Not all of this worked out before we started designing Lorwyn, by the way. We knew the larger structure of the block would include two mini-blocks consisting of a large set and a small set. We knew we were playing with the idea of duality with light and dark. And we knew that the two settings were going to be different incarnations of the same plane. But that was enough to start Lorwyn design.
Lorwyn Hearts and Minds
Many years earlier, Bill Rose approached me with an assignment. The Magic Brand team felt like we didn't have enough presence online. They asked us to start creating content for our website. They assigned the task to Bill, and he assigned it to me. I was the writer with a communications background in R&D, and I created the original DailyMTG website. As part of getting that off the ground, I needed to find an editor-in-chief for the site. That person was Aaron Forsythe.
For Fifth Dawn, the third set in the Mirrodin block, which I led the design for, I added Aaron to the Design team for two reasons. One, I thought it would make for a good article. And two, I thought Aaron would enjoy it. What I didn't know was how good he would be at it. Aaron was the superstar of the Design team, designing most of the mechanics in the set. He was so good, in fact, we ended up hiring him for R&D. He's my boss now, so obviously that went well.
I bring this all up because Lorwyn was Aaron's first time designing a large set. He had been on numerous teams and led the design of Dissension, but I felt he was ready for the biggest challenge we have in R&D: designing a large set on a new plane. The Design team started with just a few parameters: the mini-block structure and the typal theme. I also insisted that every typal theme be in at least two colors.
That last bit was very important to me. Part of figuring out what we wanted to do with a new typal block involved looking back at what the previous typal block had done. Before design even began, we did some Limited playtesting with Onslaught boosters. We discovered that the typal theme was pretty light, but many of the creature types had a powerful, very linear card at common that tended to dominate the Limited format. That made it feel more typal than the as-fan was supporting. Pulling back the power level of common typal cards required us to approach the set differently.
We also realized that the typal themes were simplistic. Because most creature types only showed up in one color, the themes were mostly highlighting what that color did. If you played a Goblin deck, you just did red things. By expanding creature types to a second color, we could add a lot of nuance and flexibility to the typal themes. It also allowed us to start crafting a play experience with them rather than just highlighting what that color's strengths were.
Aaron wanted to make sure Design and Creative were on the same page, so he added Brady Dommermuth, Magic's former creative director, to the Design team. First, we nailed down the set's central creature types. To differentiate Lorwyn from Morningtide, I wanted Lorwyn to focus on species creature types and Morningtide to focus on class creature types.
The Design team decided we should start by figuring out which creature type was central to each color. We started with green. Players love Elves, and we felt they were a great creature for showing off the light and dark sides. Next was blue. Magic had made a conscious effort to remove Merfolk from the game, but our audience didn't like that. I argued that Lorwyn having Merfolk support would set it apart from Onslaught, so the team signed on with having Merfolk as the core blue creature type.
Goblins were the obvious choice for red, but Aaron argued against it. Goblins had been the poster child of the typal themes in Onslaught, and Aaron felt repeating it would make the two sets feel too similar. Brady pitched the idea of "fire people," what would eventually become flamekin, as an Elemental creature. The team thought it sounded cool.
White was tricky because it didn't really have a characteristic race like the other four colors. White mostly used Humans, but we didn't feel that was the right fit for this set. Also, when the Human creature type was introduced in Mirrodin, R&D had promised to not make Human typal cards. We would eventually break that rule in Innistrad, but the Lorwyn team didn't feel a need to do it. Brady suggested Kithkin, a creature type that had shown up on one card in Legends. Kithkin had sort of a halfling vibe that the team liked, so we agreed.
We also discussed what creature type our big creatures should be. We had used Beast in Onslaught, but this time, we didn't want to use a catch-all creature type. Giant was proposed, and we liked it, so we added it to the list. As we figured out which creature types we wanted to include, Brady kept looking for real-world inspiration we could use as a guide. Conceptually, elves, merfolk, elementals, kithkin, and giants lean toward Celtic mythology. That led us to Faeries and Treefolk. We picked Faeries because we needed some fliers and Treefolk to complement Giants as large creatures.
That left a gap in black. Vampires and Zombies didn't fit the feeling we were going for, so we turned to Celtic mythology. Was there anything that felt like a good fit for black? Boggarts? Boggarts were mischievous little creatures always causing trouble. The more we looked into them, the more we realized they were basically just Goblins. We decided that centering Goblins in black would make them feel pretty different from Onslaught and added them to the file.
Okay, we had our eight creature types—Kithkin, Merfolk, Goblins, Elementals, Elves, Faeries, Giants, and Treefolk. We made sure each one had at least two colors. Kithkin was primary in white and secondary in green. Merfolk was primary in blue and secondary in white. Goblins were primary in black and secondary in red to tie into Magic's history of red Goblins. Elementals were primary in red, but we decided to allow them to show up in all colors. Elves were primary in green and secondary in black. We liked that they were kind of the meanest creatures on Lorwyn. We wanted Faeries to be tricksters, and they needed to fly, so we made them blue and black. Giants would be red and white. Treefolk were primary in green but also in white and black.
The set would get a ninth creature type, but that would happen in the middle of design. For Draft, it's important to have cards that players can fight over. If one card is only desirable for one type of drafter, then that player will draft that card every time they draft. That leads to a lot repetition. We needed something that players could fight over, something that would be desirable by more than one drafter. I dubbed this missing element "typal glue." Something has to hold together the disparate parts of a typal set, and all players should want to draft it.
My solution involved borrowing a design I'd made years earlier on a card from the Onslaught block. The set had a bunch of blue creatures, called the Mistform, which had the activated ability to change their creature type. I was designing their leader, a legendary creature, so I was looking for an extreme version of the Mistform ability. The solution I came to involved allowing it to be all creature types at all times. The card was called
I turned the
Lorwyning Combination
That's all the time I have for today. Next week, I'll walk through all the mechanics in Lorwyn and talk through the designs of Morningtide, Shadowmoor, and Eventide. As always, I'm eager for your thoughts on today's article, any of the elements I talked about, or on the Lorwyn block. You can email me or contact me through social media (Bluesky, Tumblr, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter).
Join me next week for part two.
Until then, try to predict what parts of the Lorwyn block will return in Lorwyn Eclipsed.