Playing to Lorwyn, Part 2
Last week, I started telling the story of the Lorwyn block's design. We left off with the team finalizing the nine creature types for Lorwyn. We'll pick up the story from there.
One of the things we spent a lot of time on was trying to make Lorwyn feel kinder than Shadowmoor. We looked into including less-destructive effects in Lorwyn, but that would give players less answers to threats and lead to poor gameplay. We tried using -1/-1 counters with the flavor that instead of killing creatures, you're roughing them up, but we found that -1/-1 counters felt even meaner than normal creature removal. We ended up pushing -1/-1 counters to Shadowmoor (including the persist mechanic we had created; more on that below).
Aaron created a treasure-themed mechanic that went on lands. You would exile cards with your lands and could tap creatures to "dig them up." It warped the games in ways that weren't fun. The mechanic ended up becoming hideaway, which we included on a cycle of rare lands. In the end, the solution to the tone was to capture it more creatively and less mechanically. Magic gameplay is fun, and anything we did to mess with it just made the set play worse.
Last week and today, I covered changeling and hideaway. Let me walk through the rest of the mechanics in the block:
Champion
This mechanic came about because Matt Place had a conversation with Bill Rose about how it was odd that Magic had never done an evolution-themed mechanic. Many other card games allowed you to upgrade your creatures into bigger, buffer versions. Why hadn't Magic ever done this? Bill came up to me and said, "We should do an evolution-themed mechanic some day." Lorwyn would be that day.
We didn't want to do one-for-one transformation (where Creature A always turns into Creature B), as that was a bit too limiting in gameplay. We still wanted it to feel flavorful, so there needed to be some limitation. Focusing on creature types felt like the sweet spot, which is why Lorwyn was the right place to do it. To offset the inherent card disadvantage, we chose to have these cards exile the creature that "evolved." Then, the exiled creature would return if the creature with the ability (called champion) left the battlefield. We made a rare cycle (and an extra blue card) for all the main creature types and three Shapeshifters with changeling for uncommon as they played better in Limited.
Clash
I believe this mechanic was another result of us exploring ways to show conflict that wasn't necessarily fighting. Interestingly, the mechanic was designed for Timmy and Tammy players, as small bursts of variance determined the outcomes of effects, but it ended up being more embraced by Spikes because it was good for deck smoothing. I do think it was a noble attempt at a mechanic, but with 20/20 hindsight, it's lackluster.
Evoke
This was probably the most successful of the new mechanics in Lorwyn. My original designs for evoke were instants and sorceries with a cost that could turn them into creatures. The rules didn't work well with spells on the battlefield, so it needed to change. Luckily, making them creatures with enters effects that went away mostly captured the "spell or creature" mechanical execution I was after. Morningtide tried a version that had dies triggers instead of enters effect, which in retrospect was a mistake as they didn't play as well.
Kindred Cards (Formerly Tribal)
This was technically a new card type rather than a new mechanic, but it was one of the more innovative parts of the design. It came about because the Design team was talking about the card
Why wasn't Goblin Grenade a Goblin card? It was very goblin-esque in flavor. Could we just make spells and give them creature types? No. Subtypes are tied to specific card types (except for instants and sorceries, which share their subtypes), so the rules (again) got in our way. The Design team was adamant, though, so Mark Gottlieb, then rules manager, figured out a way to make it work. He created a new card type: kindred (then tribal). The new card type allowed you to put creature types on noncreature cards, as long as the card also had this new card type.
With hindsight, we found that the card type added a lot of words to cards (such as forcing us to specify that a spell cared about creatures, not just any spell with the subtype) with minimal gain, so we mostly stopped doing it. Modern Horizons 3 included a handful of kindred cards, and Lorwyn Eclipsed will also have a small number.
Planeswalker Cards
This was another new card type. Planeswalkers were supposed to premiere in Future Sight, but we didn't get a design that we liked enough in time, so they were pushed back to Lorwyn. The five Planeswalkers introduced in this set (often called the Lorwyn Five) were
Typal as a Theme
The big innovation that Lorwyn added to typal themes, beyond stretching them all to a second color, involved building them around a play pattern. Creatures of each creature type were part of a specific play style, adding flavor to the gameplay itself. This has become the go-to method for how we design typal themes.
Top of the Morningtide
When I became head designer, one of my goals was block planning. That is, I wanted each set in a block to have a distinct role. My idea to separate Lorwyn from Morningtide involved leaning into something that Onslaught never had a chance to do.
In the early years of Magic, creature cards only got one creature type for the most part. Eventually, the Creative team pitched the idea of most creatures having at least two creature types: one to represent their species and one for their role or class in society, such as Elf Druid or Goblin Warrior. This new system premiered in the original Mirrodin block, the block after Onslaught.
My idea was that Lorwyn would focus on species typal and Morningtide would focus on class typal. We chose five classes: Soldiers, Wizards, Rogues, Warriors, and Shamans. The idea was that because most creature cards have two creature types, we could create an environment where players could pick and choose multiple creature types to focus on in a deck. We assumed this would create a lot more options for deck building. A Goblin Rogue deck would function differently from a Goblin Warrior deck.
It didn't take long for me to realize my mistake. At Morningtide's employee Prerelease, I watched as employees would play one match and then stop. The interactions were just too much. The criss-cross of species and class creature types made an impregnable web of complexity that drove away many players. It was so bad that when Matt Place and I discussed it, it inspired the idea of New World Order, a philosophy we adopted about simplifying commons to keep down complexity for less-enfranchised players. I covered the New World Order initiative in this article.
None of the mechanics from Morningtide ended up being all that memorable.
Kinship
Kinship had you look at the top card of your library to see if it was a creature card of a matching type. It aimed to be a successor to clash but managed to be even less popular than clash, which was also not a huge hit. The idea behind it was that you could lessen the variance by playing a lot of creatures of the right creature type, but in practice it just felt too random.
Prowl
Prowl was an alternate casting cost reliant on you having dealt combat damage. It only went on Rogues. I'm not sure why we decided to create a mechanic for just one of the five class creature types that were our focus. Time would show that it was a bit too restrictive and that just caring about any creature dealing combat damage would have been fine.
Reinforce
I designed reinforce as a cycling variant. You could discard it, just like cycling, but instead of a new card, you got some number of +1/+1 counters. This follows a recurring theme with many mechanics in the block: the core idea wasn't bad, but the execution didn't quite live up to the idea. It turns out you won't often want to turn in a card for +1/+1 counters as much as you'd want to trade it for another card.
Beyond a Shadowmoor of a Doubt
We wanted the Shadowmoor mini-block to be about Magic colors, and we knew we wanted hybrid to play a large functional role. Those two decisions guided most of the set's design. It was decided early on that Shadowmoor would utilize ally-color hybrid mana and Eventide would utilize enemy-color hybrid mana. I started the design process by asking the question, "What is the highest amount of hybrid we can have in the set?" I decided the answer was 50%. That answer ended up being wrong, but I'll get to that in a bit.
Once that number was chosen, I realized we had an opportunity to do something we normally don't get a chance to do. We could make a draft enviorment where the main five draft archetypes were monocolor. Normally in a draft roughly 20% of the cards are in any one color. That means if you want to draft a monocolor deck, you have access to a small portion of the cards. In Sealed, it's usually impossible. But in Shadowmoor, 10% of the cards were any one color and each ally-color pair appeared on 10% of the set's cards. That meant for any one color, 30% of the cards were playable in a monocolor deck of that color, which is 50% more than in a normal draft. There are plenty of things to pick at about Shadowmoor, but Shadowmoor-Shadowmoor-Shadowmoor draft is one of my personal favorite draft environments. Okay, I love drafting monocolor decks.
Looking back, having hybrid cards occupy 50% of the set wasn't a great idea, mostly because hybrid design is just a bit more restrictive than I had realized. To hit our numbers, we ended up designing several cards that really wanted to be traditional multicolor cards. While there didn't end up being as many breaks as people might think (only a single-digit amount), it caused a lot of confusion around the intent of hybrid design.
Regrettably, I also decided to color shift the creature types to emphasize the change from Lorwyn to Shadowmoor. My intent was pure. I wanted to show how each version of the plane was different. But one of my other goals had been to allow the two mini-blocks to play nicely with one another, and changing which creature types were in which colors threw a wrench into that plan. With 20/20 hindsight, I would have kept the creature types in the same colors as Lorwyn and probably added a third color on some hybrid spells.
Let's jump into the mechanics of Shadowmoor.
Twobrid
As hybrid mana was such a big theme in the set, we experimented with doing something new with it. The new twist on hybrid was something we dubbed "twobrid," where you had a choice between paying a mana of a certain color or two generic mana. Shadowmoor had an uncommon cycle and one rare card with twobrid mana. Twobrid mana proved to be an interesting tool, although it's one we took a while to revisit.
-1/-1 Counters
As I explained above, we started by using -1/-1 counters in Lorwyn with the initial idea that creatures were being injured rather than killed, but it ended up feeling meaner, so we moved it off to Shadowmoor. We really liked playing up the duality between Lorwyn and Shadowmoor, so the idea of Lorwyn using +1/+1 counters and Shadowmoor using -1/-1 counters felt like great flavor. Because we hadn't ever used -1/-1 counters as the core counter of a set, we did a lot of exploration with it. While I was mostly happy with it, we did find that -1/-1 counters had one core problem.
One of my favorite game design truisms is that your game needs to have inertia which makes it end. In Magic, +1/+1 counters are good for that. They make your creatures stronger and encourage you to be aggressive. It leads to the battlefield growing in power over time. However, -1/-1 counters have the opposite effect. They shrink the battlefield, often killing creatures, and make it harder to end the game. This adds an extra level of challenge to building an environment with -1/-1 counters as the default counter. To help keep complexity in check and help players read the board, our default is for sets to have only one core type of counter, usually +1/+1 counters.
Persist
Persist was created during the brief window that -1/-1 counters were in Lorwyn. When we moved the counters to Shadowmoor, we also moved persist. I generally liked how persist played. It encouraged aggression, which was important in Shadowmoor. To simplify the interaction between +1/+1 and -1/-1 counters in Constructed formats, we made a rule that they canceled each other out (if you had one of each, you removed both). This ended up creating some extra combos with persist. I would later remake persist with +1/+1 counters in Dark Ascension as the undying mechanic.
Wither
Wither came about because we were playing around with new mechanical space with -1/-1 counters. Many years earlier, we had toyed with a mechanic that made all damage dealt to creatures permanent, but it ended up being too hard to track. Adding -1/-1 counters to the set solved that problem. While I enjoyed the flavor (we would later combine wither with poison counters to create infect), it did lean into the problem that I explained above where it slowed down the inertia that helped the game end.
Untap Symbol
The untap symbol also played into the duality theme. Mark Gottlieb suggested it, and it felt like a perfect inclusion thematically. Sadly, the untap symbol ran into two problems. One, while the untap symbol is a color-inverted version of the tap symbol (making the black arrow into a white arrow), and was turned upside down, it looked too much like a tap symbol if you weren't paying close attention. Two, tapping your card to indicate you've used it for the turn is very intuitive. It's why Richard Garfield included it when he made the game. Untapping as a resource was very unintuitive, and it was hard to grok how to use it. In addition, players were constantly attacking into tapped creatures, forgetting that a tapped creature had the ability to untap itself and block. I am skeptical that the untap symbol would ever be used widely again.
Color as a Theme
I've always been a big fan of "colors matter" as a theme, but as Magic has evolved, color has become less and less a part of core evergreen mechanics. The main reason is that caring about color is very swingy, as it's devastating against some decks, and it's meaningless against others. That is why we've moved away from things like fear and intimidate in favor of menace. Shadowmoor was the last set where we used "colors matter" in a big way. I have been trying to find a place to bring back the theme, but it's tricky to do.
Conspire
Conspire was added during development. The set was light on cards affecting spells and this was an attempt to tie the "colors matter" theme to spells. Having two untapped creatures of the same color as a spell on the battlefield—both of which you were willing to tap—proved to be a bit much, and this mechanic didn't see a lot of play.
Call It Eventide
Eventide's main thrust was to be like Shadowmoor but for enemy-color hybrid spells. I knew there was only so much hybrid design space (I overestimated that limit, but I knew there would be one), so going to enemy-color cards made sense from a resource angle. The problem was that you had to draft the two sets together, and there was a strong colors-matter theme, so the two just weren't seamless when paired together. Yes, you could draft a monocolor deck, but the cards in your deck would care about the four other colors, and that proved hard to balance.
The other problem with focusing on enemy-color pairs was that it didn't line up with our creature types, which forced the Creative team to make some new ones, also based on Celtic mythology. It's why the set had things like Noggles. While creatively this was fun, it meant the Shadowmoor mini-block wouldn't play as nicely with the typal theme of the Lorwyn mini-block.
Eventide introduced two new mechanics.
Retrace
Retrace allowed you to essentially turn lands in your hand into copies of spells with retrace in your graveyard. It was a practical mechanic, but it had what we call a "repetition of play" problem. Richard had you shuffle your deck because it's important for games to play out differently. If the same things keep happening, the game becomes less fun. Casting a retrace spell meant that from that point forward, you were going to keep seeing that effect again and again.
Chroma
This mechanic started as a single card submission by Aaron Forsythe in Fifth Dawn design. I liked it so much, I told him it should be a whole mechanic and that we needed to save it. We teased it in Future Sight on a timeshifted card (
All in all, Eventide was kind of a mess. As of this writing, I have led or co-led the design of forty-one released sets, and Eventide is clearly in my bottom five.
Looking Back
One of the joys of designing Magic is that you get to constantly iterate and improve upon your designs. This does mean when you look back, you tend to see all the mistakes that led you to learn and improve in the first place. The biggest mistake of the whole Lorwyn block, which falls squarely on my head as head designer, was being too aggressive in the themes. Lorwyn had too much typal and Shadowmoor had too much hybrid mana. I think I was trying to find the upper limit of each theme. In both cases, I went too far. Historically, that's important, as it helped us learn where the upper bound is for these themes, but it's still tough to look back and not say, "What was I thinking?"
On the positive side, this block did do a lot of innovating. It invented things that would be essential to the sets that followed it. Probably the biggest was proving that we could do a large non-core set outside of the fall. Our move toward doing more large sets and to stop doing small sets started here. Lorwyn also gave us the idea of building typal themes around mechanical functions rather than just Magic colors. This was instrumental in shaping how we'd do future typal sets and how we'd craft draft archetypes in non-typal sets.While the block has its share of duds, there were a number of good mechanics (or at least shells of good mechanics in the case of chroma) that we would revisit and improve upon.
The last big thing the Lorwyn block did was show us that Magic was able to push further in tone. In many ways, part of why the Lorwyn block struggled was that it was a bit ahead of its time. It showed the future of Magic at a time when everyone wasn't quite ready yet, but they would be. Making Lorwyn, I believe, helped us get there faster.
Here Comes the Eclipsed
I hope this look back prepares you all for the next set coming our way: Lorwyn Eclipsed. I am going to take two weeks off for winter break, but when I return in January, I will start previews for our return to Lorwyn-Shadowmoor. I did this two-part series to help you understand what happened eighteen years ago because it plays such an important role in how Lorwyn Eclipsed was designed.
As always, if you have any feedback on today's column, on any part of the Lorwyn block, or anything I discussed over these last two weeks, feel free to email me or contact me through social media (Bluesky, Tumblr, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter).
See you in three weeks for the start of Lorwyn Eclipsed previews.
Until then, may you look back at the Lorwyn block and find the parts you're most excited to see return.