Total Eclipsed of the Sun

Welcome to the start of Lorwyn Eclipsed previews. Today, I'll be talking about the set's design, introduce its design teams, and show off some cool preview cards. I hope that sounds fun.

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A Lorwyn-ing Team

Before I get into today's design story, I want to begin by introducing you to the members of the Lorwyn Eclipsed Vision, Set, and Commander Design teams. Mark Gottlieb will introduce the Vision and Set design teams. He led the Vision Design team for the full time and the Set Design team for three months before handing it off to Michael Majors. Take it away, Mark.

Ellie Rice will introduce the Commander Design team. Take it away, Ellie.

Can I Please Have a Little Shadowmoor?

Before vacation, I wrote a two-part article (Playing to Lorwyn, Part 1 and Part 2) where I walked through the history of the original Lorwyn and Shadowmoor blocks. The part I didn't get to was what happened after the set came out. It wasn't received as well as we had hoped. As I explained in the two-part article, there are lot of design decisions we made back then (many of which were made by me) that proved to be the wrong call. Because of this, I didn't think we'd ever return to Lorwyn-Shadowmoor.

But then we made Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty. Kamigawa was another plane I was highly skeptical of returning to based on its initial reception, but there was such an outpouring of support to return to Kamigawa on my blog that we leaned into it when the opportunity arose. And Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty was a huge hit, going on to become one of the best-selling Magic sets of all time. It made us think about reexamining past designs which hadn't proven successful at the time.

Meanwhile, having returned to Kamigawa, the readers of my blog turned their attention to the next plane they wanted to revisit: Lorwyn-Shadowmoor. There were enough positive responses that we added a question about what plane players would like to return to in one of our market-research surveys. Lorwyn-Shadowmoor was one of the top choices from the respondents. That was enough to get the ball rolling.

I'd been thinking about a return to Lorwyn-Shadowmoor on my own time. Here was the big challenge. I didn't think I'd get a green light if I pitched two separate sets. One, the bar to stay on the same plane for two consecutive sets had gotten pretty high. Two, we'd created planes like Lorwyn and planes like Shadowmoor. The thing that defined the plane was the duality of it, the light combined with the dark. Three, at the end of the Lorwyn and Shadowmoor block's story, the Great Aurora ended, which was the thing that kept changing the world back and forth.

My solution to all these problems was the following pitch. What if the end of the Great Aurora didn't trap the plane in one state? What if it combined them? What if Lorwyn and Shadowmoor weren't two separate worlds anymore? What if they had been mixed into one? One member of the Creative team used the metaphor of a marble cake that's constantly marbling.

The part I was most intrigued by was the idea that the inhabitants of the plane could still change, but their changes were now dictated by geography (and that geography could shift over time). If you went to a part of the plane that was under Shadowmoor's influence, you would become your Shadowmoor version. Lorwyn and Shadowmoor had never interacted with one another before. Now they could. That seemed like a cool premise and something we could do in a single set.

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Two in One

We started our design process similarly to how we start any return to a plane. We listed all the things that we did the first time around. Here's a list of the mechanics and mechanical themes in the Lorwyn and Shadowmoor blocks:

• Champion
• Changeling
• Chroma
• Clash
• Colors matter
• Conspire
• Evoke
• Hideaway
• Hybrid mana
• Kinship
• Persist
• Prowl
• Reinforce
• Retrace
• Typal
• Twobrid mana
• Untap symbol
• Wither
• -1/-1 Counters

We broke these into three categories:

1. Things we felt we had to do
2. Things we thought we should consider doing
3. Things we felt we shouldn't do

Here's the breakdown of those categories:

#1: Things We Should Do

• Changeling
• Colors matter
• Hybrid mana
• Typal

We knew the set needed to capture Lorwyn and Shadowmoor. Nothing defines Lorwyn more than typal themes, so that was an automatic inclusion. We felt changeling was a very effective typal glue, meaning it helps hold the various typal themes together. We consider it every time we do a typal theme, so how could we revisit its origin and not use it? Colors mattering was to Shadowmoor what typal was to Lorwyn, and hybrid mana was a fundamental part of how Shadowmoor used the colors-matter theme. Those were the four elements we knew we needed.

#2: Things We Should Consider

• Champion
• Evoke
• Hideaway
• Persist
• Reinforce
• Twobrid mana
• Wither
• -1/-1 Counters

These were mechanics from the original blocks that had some level of player excitement. R&D had soured on -1/-1 counter-focused environments, so there was a bar to clear if we wanted to do that here. Persist and wither could only be done in a -1/-1 counter environment. Twobrid mana had just been used in Tarkir: Dragonstorm, so we questioned if we wanted it to return this quickly. Champion had some execution issues to solve, hideaway has limited design space, and we felt reinforce had been poorly designed on a card-by-card level. Of all these mechanics, evoke was the one we were most excited to bring back, but it had its own design issues to tackle (and we felt the Lorwyn execution of the mechanic was far better than Morningtide's take).

#3: Things We Shouldn't Do

• Chroma
• Clash
• Conspire
• Kinship
• Prowl
• Retrace
• Untap symbol

Chroma had been a bad first attempt at what would later prove to be a pretty popular mechanic when we redid it as devotion. We did talk about including devotion in the set, but felt it would be an odd inclusion from a flavor perspective. Clash and kinship had been poorly received, conspire and prowl were unmemorable, retrace had repetition-of-play issues, and the untap symbol proved to be problematic on two levels. Too many players confused it for the tap symbol and it was hard for players to intuitively understand it.

This didn't mean that we couldn't include cameos for or reference any of these mechanics, but they were much lower on our list of elements to care about.

When we started designing the set, the initial idea was that the core conflict of the set would be Lorwyn versus Shadowmoor. We liked the idea that you could sometimes be on one side of the conflict and sometimes on the other, depending on what part of the plane was influencing you. Because we started with this framework, our earliest stab at the structure of the set was similar to Mirrodin Besieged where one half the set was fighting the other half of the set. We even considered following in that set's footsteps and having people choose a side to play with at Prerelease.

So, we had to start thinking of the set as two halves put together.

Lorwyn

We knew we wanted a typal theme that tapped into the eight creature types we focused on in Lorwyn, but we wanted to apply the many lessons we'd learned over the years about typal design. The best executions require players to put together a deck of creatures that share a type, but their deck works well because the creatures play well together from a strategic perspective, not because the cards mechanically care about that creature type. Those cards can and should exist at higher rarities for Constructed, but they shouldn't be a core part of the set's Limited gameplay. We expected to include creatures with changeling, and we were interested if we could include evoke and champion (or at least something reminiscent of champion).

This brings us to my card previews for today. One of the biggest issues that champion had was that the mechanic required you to have a creature of the appropriate creature type on the battlefield before you played the card with champion. If you didn't, the card was dead in your hand. Was there a way to recreate champion but keep that flavor? Yes, as it turns out.

Let me show you my two preview cards, then I'll talk about the solution we found.

Lastly, we added +1/+1 counters to the Lorwyn side. We wanted to lean into the setting's duality and felt that Lorwyn having +1/+1 counters and Shadowmoor having -1/-1 counters played into their themes and represented their mirroring. Normally, we only have one core counter type (usually +1/+1 counters) per set, so deviating from that was a big deal. Our idea was to provide punch-out counters in Play Boosters, and we expected the intermixing of the counters to use up a certain amount of the set's complexity.

Shadowmoor

We knew we were going to have a colors-matter theme, which hybrid mana would play a role in supporting (although at a much lower as-fan than in Shadowmoor). We spent a lot of time looking at various executions of the theme from Shadowmoor and Eventide. The other theme we decided to include was a -1/-1 counter theme. We felt it was one of the most iconic parts of the Shadowmoor mini-block, and we hadn't used -1/-1 counters in a while, so it felt like it was time for -them to return.

We played around with several Shadowmoor mechanics. A few of them, like persist, wither, and conspire, show up in the set on a small number cards. But overall, we ended up exploring some new mechanics. Blight was a favorite for -1/-1 counters of those we designed. It involves an extra cost where you put some number of -1/-1 counters on creatures you control. The original version required the creature you blighted to have a toughness greater than or equal to the number of counters you put on it, but that restriction was removed to simplify the cards.

The other mechanic we liked was called "rainbow." It would become the ability word vivid from the finished set. It was a mechanic we'd talked about for years, but we hadn't had a colors-matter set to put it in. "Rainbow" counted the number of colors from among permanents you had in play to set a variable number for an effect. It was originally inspired by Invasion's domain mechanic. The version we used during vision design worked like Zendikar Rising's party mechanic, where any one card could only count toward one number. For example, if you controlled a mono-blue and a five-color permanent, your "rainbow" (or vivid) count would be two. You would count the blue card as blue and could count the five-color card as any color, but only as one of that color. Like blight, vivid was later simplified to lower its complexity.

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A Different Approach

For the half-Lorwyn, half-Shadowmoor approach, we had five ally-color archetypes that were flavored as Lorwyn and five enemy-color archetypes that were flavored as Shadowmoor. Conceptually, this sounded great. That is, until we tried to execute it. The first challenge involved the typal themes. We wanted to stay true to Lorwyn. Okay, Merfolk were white and blue, Faeries were blue and black, Goblins were black and red, and Kithkin were green and white. Those were all good. What about red and green? It had to be Elementals. The flamekin, specifically, were only in red, but the other colors had their own Elementals. But that left out Elves, which are a pretty popular creature type. Elves were green and white in Shadowmoor, but the Lorwyn ones were famously black and green.

On the Shadowmoor side, we found we were having problems with the "rainbow" mechanic. We enjoyed how the mechanic played, but while it clearly matched the colors-matter theme of Shadowmoor, it felt emotionally more like a Lorwyn mechanic. A spectrum of colors had more of a bright, optimistic feel to it.

And there was an additional problem. By isolating everything into either the Lorwyn or Shadowmoor side, we weren't playing in the space where we intermingled elements of both. Part of returning to a plane requires playing in new design spaces. Lorwyn and Shadowmoor co-existing was the new thing to interact with thematically.

That led us to make a major change to the file. What if instead of a setting where Lorwyn and Shadowmoor were at odds, we had a setting where they mingled? Yes, there would still be some conflicts between them, but the structure of the set didn't have to divide evenly. We could have Lorwyn elements, Shadowmoor elements, and some elements that mixed the two aspects. The Creative team had created areas that were neutral areas between the two sides, so there was a justification for why Lorwyn mechanics would interact with Shadowmoor mechanics.

This resulted in a few big structural changes. First, the set didn't have to be half and half. Each element could take up as much room as it needed. More on this soon. Second, we didn't have to tie the ally colors to Lorwyn and the enemy colors to Shadowmoor. That allowed us to better reflect the creature themes we wanted:

• White-blue: Merfolk
• Black-red: Goblins
• Green-white: Kithkin
• Blue-red: Elementals
• Black-green: Elves

This allowed us to get the Elves and portray them in the two colors people associate with them in Lorwyn. The Elementals also felt more at home in blue and red, as those are the two colors that normally represent the four elements. As you will see soon, Faeries is still available as a theme but less focused as a typal archetype.

Another issue with the half-and-half approach was that the newer mechanics tended to fall on the Shadowmoor side, but we wanted Lorwyn to have a bigger impact (it is in the name Lorwyn Eclipsed, after all). This change allowed us to let the five typal archetypes take up a bit more room in the file. For example, while all ten archetypes have an uncommon hybrid card, only the five typal themes get a multicolor signpost.

The next change that came about as we moved away from the half-and-half approach was less of a need for mirroring. Mixing +1/+1 counters and -1/-1 counters was confusing. When you saw a creature with counters on it, you didn't know how big it was. There's a reason we don't normally mix counters, and playtesting the set reminded us why. In the end, the Set Design team decided that -1/-1 counters were more crucial to the set structure. They enjoyed how blight played, and it made including persist and wither cameos easier. Shadowmoor was also famously the first Limited environment built around -1/-1 counters, while +1/+1 counters are the default and show up in most sets.

The Set Design team would also simplify blight and vivid. Blight could now go on any creature. There wasn't a restriction on the toughness of the creature being blighted. If you want to blight 3 onto a 1/1 creature, that was okay. Vivid started just counting the number of colors rather than making you pick what color each permanent represented.

The other five archetypes all have themes built around mechanical elements of the set. Red-green and green-blue lean into vivid, with red-green being a midrange strategy. It focuses on a wave of attacking creatures, using vivid effects as a way to supercharge the creatures and get over the finish line to victory. Green-blue, in contrast, is more of a ramp strategy using powerful vivid rewards and expensive spells in the late game.

White-black and red-white lean into blight. White-black uses -1/-1 counters as a resource to create a well-oiled machine of value. You put -1/-1 counters on your creatures and remove them to accrue advantage. Red-white takes big creatures that enter with a lot of -1/-1 counters and removes the counters to turn them into giant threats and clear the path to attack.

Blue-black is themed around trickery and playing cards on the opponent's turn. It makes use of flash creatures, mostly Faeries, and instants. We knew there were a lot of fans of Faeries, so we wanted to make an archetype where they played an important role.

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The Cards Have Two Faces

The last element of the set I want to talk about are the double-faced cards. When I first pitched the idea of returning to Lorwyn-Shadowmoor to the Arc Planning team, I brought up that double-faced cards (DFCs) seemed ideal for this plane. The original Lorwyn and Shadowmoor block didn't have them because Magic hadn't started using them yet (that would happen in Innistrad a few years later). But if there ever was a Magic setting that played into the duality of transformation, Lorwyn-Shadowmoor was that setting.

The idea from the very beginning was that one face would represent the Lorwyn version of the creature and the other face would represent the Shadowmoor side of the creature. As I explained above, creatures that moved around the plane would change as they entered areas under the influence of Lorwyn or Shadowmoor, so the flavor was spot on.

When I was first thinking about the set, I questioned how many double-faced cards we could have. What if every card was double-faced? Well, that contradicted the feeling we were going for. The world wasn't always one or the other. Also, tracking just one or two double-faced cards requires attention. Tracking the whole board? That felt like madness. While overdoing themes was a signature of the Lorwyn and Shadowmoor block, that wasn't something we felt needed to return. We started with where Innistrad had ended up, one DFC per booster pack (i.e., an as-fan of one).

We quickly realized there was another problem to tackle. We didn't want one side to be stronger than the other. Much of Innistrad's transformation took weak Humans and turned them into powerful monsters. The cards were just better from a gameplay sense when they were transformed. Modal double-faced cards didn't make sense here because the ability to change back and forth was core to the setting's concept. This meant we needed designs where each face was of roughly equal value.

We tried several different designs. The ones I found the most interesting were cards that kind of functioned like the phasing mechanic from Mirage, where the creature would just go back and forth each turn. On odd turns the card was the Lorwyn side, and on even turns it was the Shadowmoor side. This design formula did a lot to simplify things. Because the cards transformed on their own, you didn't have to spend any brainpower figuring out when you had to switch them. But they really lacked any sense of agency. The creatures of Lorwyn-Shadowmoor do have a say on what side they exist in.

That led us to the current designs where the creatures have a cost you can pay to turn themselves back and forth. To help encourage this, many of them trigger when they are transformed. This design limitation, plus the experience of playtesting with the DFCs, led to us cutting them way down in as-fan. We ended up with seven DFCs, a cycle of rares and two mythic rares (one with an Elemental God on each face and a double-faced planeswalker, Oko). They show up a little for splash, but they aren't a defining element of Limited play.

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A Lorwyn-ing Combination

And that brings us to the end of our design story for Lorwyn Eclipsed. As always, I'm eager for your thoughts, be it on today's column, on Lorwyn Eclipsed, or on any of the elements I talked about today. You can email me or contact me through social media (Bluesky, Tumblr, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter).

Join me next week to check out the vision design handoff document for Lorwyn Eclipsed.

Until then, may you have as much fun playing Lorwyn Eclipsed as we had making it.