Then and Now, Part 2

Last week, I started telling stories about various Lorwyn Eclipsed cards and the previous designs that inspired them. Today, I’m going to tell some more stories.

Goatnap and Oft-Nabbed Goat

0142_MTGECL_Main: Goatnap


0011_MTGECL_CommNew: Oft-Nabbed Goat

Here’s an example of two different cards in Lorwyn Eclipsed that reference the same card from the original Lorwyn set. To tell this story, I have to go back to Lorwyn design and talk about the making of Goatnapper.

We had chosen to make a typal set built around eight creature types. Because the typal theme was so strong, it drove the mechanical themes of the draft archetypes. So, if you draft a Goblin in your first booster, you were highly incentivized to keep drafting Goblins. The core problem here was that the Goblin player wanted Goblins, but no one else did. That’s a problem for two reasons.

One, gameplay becomes repetitive because the Goblin player keeps drafting and playing the same cards, creating less variance in their games. Generally, variance is key to things being fun, so it would lessen the number of drafts they’d want to do. Drafts get “stale” faster.

Two, it decreases dynamics between drafters. If two players seated next to each other are never interested in the same cards, there’s less interaction between them, which makes for a less-interesting draft. The solution to this problem was to create some kind of typal glue, or something that made players fight over the same cards some of the time. Lorwyn‘s typal glue is the changeling mechanic. Creatures with changeling are all creature types, so every deck playing that color would want them. We put some creatures with changeling in Lorwyn. They played well, so we upped the number of changeling creatures. There ended up being a lot of creatures with changeling in the file.

This brings me to Goatnapper. We wanted to have a creature with what we call a Threaten effect. These effects steal a creature from an opponent for the turn, usually giving it haste so it can attack. The ability is in red, so we could put it on a Goblin, an Elemental, or a Giant. We wanted the creature to be small, so that ruled out Giants. A Goblin stealing things just felt more flavorful than an Elemental, so we chose to make it a Goblin.

Since Lorwyn is a typal set, it felt like an opportunity to do something more focused. What creature type should this Goblin steal? That’s when someone came up with the idea of the creature stealing Goats. It was a cutesy way to have it interact with changeling creatures. Everybody on the design team loved the card, and it went into the set.

Then came the big argument. Some of the team felt (myself included) that we should put one Goat in the set so that there was an actual Goat for the Goatnapper to nab. It would help establish that there are goats on Lorwyn that the Goatnapper could steal. The other side felt it was funnier if the set had zero Goats. I personally designed a number of Goats, put them in the file, and watched them get removed or turned into something other than a Goat. Because Lorwyn has so many typal effects, creature types were a valuable resource. Because of this, there ended up being no cards in Lorwyn with Goat in their type line.

I was able to make two cards in Eventide that create 0/1 white Goat tokens. Springjack Shepherd and Springjack Pasture helped communicate that there were Goats on Lorwyn-Shadowmoor. They were 0/1 creatures, it was silly to steal them with Goatnapper, but goblins aren’t exactly the most clever creatures.

Goatnap came about because we wanted a Threaten effect in Lorwyn Eclipsed, but this time on a spell rather than a creature. Goatnapper had been such a memorable card that it felt like the obvious place to make a callback. Threaten effects often have a rider depending on some quality of the creature you steal, so caring about whether it was a Goat (or a creature with changeling) felt ideal.

Oft-Nabbed Goat from Lorwyn Eclipsed Commander and originally created for the first Modern Horizons, in contrast, didn’t originate as a callback. We don’t use -1/-1 counters very often, so when we do, we like to explore ways we can use them that +1/+1 counters can’t easily replicate. Normally, if we make a -1/-1 counter card, we can make a parallel +1/+1 counter version by shifting the power and toughness. Let’s say I want to make a 5/5 creature that gets a -1/-1 counter whenever a creature you control enters. You can also create a 0/0 with five +1/+1 counters where you remove a +1/+1 counter whenever a creature you control enters, and those two cards will play similarly.

We’re always looking to make versions that don’t just use the opposite counter. While some of the -1/-1 counter cards in Lorwyn Eclipsed can mostly be replicated with +1/+1 counters because it’s hard to completely avoid that, we like to find unique design space when we can. Oft-Nabbed Goat is a cool card where players get to steal a creature back and forth, and its value goes up the more times it’s stolen. The -1/-1 counters are invaluable here because we didn’t want the creature to be something you would attack with, and a +1/+1 counter version would have to start essentially as a 5/5. With -1/-1 counters, you can build up the counters but still have the power at essentially zero (creatures with negative power deal no damage).

So, we designed this cool card where you steal a creature back and forth. What kind of creature should it be? Well, Modern Horizons was all about mechanical callbacks and Lorwyn did establish the type of creature that gets stolen often: Goats.

Figure of Fable

0224_MTGECL_Main: Figure of Fable

At MagicCon: Chicago 2025, I did a talk about the top 20 most influential card designs of all time. The third most influential design was this card:

Figure of Destiny was designed by Brian Tinsman. Brian was trying to find ways to show progression within a single card. His idea was to create a creature that could be upgraded three times with three activated abilities. But that didn’t leave a lot of space for rules text. How can you require the player to activate the first ability before activating the second or third abilities?

Brian came up with a clever solution. Each activation could add a new creature type to the creature, acting as the gate for the next activation. Besides allowing us to fit all the rules text on the card, the creature types also acted as flavor to help sell the story of the creature’s progression. Because it was in Eventide, Brian used hybrid mana for the mana cost and activated abilities, allowing the card to go in more decks.

Figure of Destiny ended up being a great template that has become another tool we use somewhat frequently. It’s flavorful, splashy, and plays well, so we keep using it. But it doesn’t stop at individual card designs.

Figure of Destiny was the inspiration for the level-up mechanic from Rise of the Eldrazi. That mechanic was designed by Brian Tinsman.

It also inspired the Class subtype which first showed up in Dungeons & Dragons: Adventures in the Forgotten Realms, representing classes from Dungeons & Dragons. Classes returned in Bloomburrow, where they represented the talents of the animalfolk.

Figure of Destiny was one of many inspirations from the creation of double-faced cards. It has been very influential on Magic design. Of course, this means we had to revisit it when we returned to Lorwyn-Shadowmoor.

The new design had to address a few issues. First, it felt appropriate for the new version of the card to be a Kithkin, but the first card had appeared in Eventide. In Lorwyn and Morningtide, the Kithkin are white and green. In Shadowmoor, the Kithkin are white and blue. Because Eventide was an enemy-color hybrid set, it had to be red-white or white-black. White and red felt better to the story Brian wanted to tell with the card (and every other Kithkin in Eventide was mono-white).

Kithkin in Lorwyn Eclipsed are one of the five creature types we focused on, and it matched the original Lorwyn set where the Kithkin were white and green. The card paid homage to the original. It changed in some ways that were cool, so we made the decision to make it a green-white hybrid card.

Next was the evolution of its power and toughness. Figure of Destiny followed this format:

• It starts as a 1/1 for one hybrid mana.
• You could then pay one hybrid mana to make it a 2/2.
• You could then pay three hybrid mana to make it a 4/4.
• You could then pay six hybrid mana to make it an 8/8 with flying and first strike.

Starting with a 1/1 for one hybrid mana felt like it was something we should carry over. Having the creature become a 2/2 for one hybrid mana activation felt a bit weak. Creatures have improved quite a bit since Eventide, and green and white are the most creature-centric colors. We could do better than a 2/2, so we decided to make it a 2/3.

This change introduced a new wrinkle. Figure of Destiny doubled its size with each activation. Once we changed the first activation from becoming a 2/2 to a 2/3, we broke that structure. Instead of doubling, we decided we would increase the creature by one more each time, meaning the first activation would grant one more power. The second activation would grant two more power, and the third activation would grant three more power. To have them feel connected, the toughness would always be one greater; it grew from a 2/3 to a 4/5 to a 7/8.

The design team wanted to make the activated abilities similar to each other. Each card’s abilities cost one mana, then three mana, then six mana. To follow that format for Figure of Fable, they needed to make the costs slightly easier to pay for balance reasons, so some amount of hybrid mana was converted to generic mana. To keep the aesthetic, the first activated ability uses one hybrid mana, the second uses two hybrid mana, and the third uses three hybrid mana.

Finally, they needed to come up with an ability or abilities for the last activated ability. Green doesn’t tend to get flying or first strike, so repeating the abilities wasn’t an option. Green and white overlap in the following evergreen keywords: defender, flash, indestructible, vigilance, and ward. Defender is a downside. Granting flash wouldn’t do anything. Indestructible was a little stronger than Play Design wanted. We considered vigilance but decided on a mechanic that was at least deciduous for both colors: protection.

The Incarnations

0209_MTGECL_Main: Catharsis


0212_MTGECL_Main: Deceit


0222_MTGECL_Main: Emptiness


0249_MTGECL_Main: Vibrance


0252_MTGECL_Main: Wistfulness

One day, Bill Rose said he had something to tell me and something to ask me. First, he was putting together the design team for Invasion, then codenamed “Beijing,” and he wanted me to be part of the team. It was going to Bill Rose, Mike Elliott, and myself. At the time, we were the three strongest full-time Magic designers in R&D. The Mercadian Masques block was not looking great (and didn’t end up doing that well), and Bill, who had recently become head designer, was eager to make sure that Invasion was a hit, so he got the three best designers in Magic R&D to be the design team. Then came the question: could we use my dad’s house in Tahoe to do the first week of the design?

I believe it was in Tahoe that Bill first pitched the kicker mechanic. We’d had a handful of cards that essentially did what kicker did, but it didn’t have a name, and Bill wanted to formalize it. We spent a lot of that first week exploring kicker’s design space, and it turns out that it was pretty big. One of the things that fascinated me was the idea of creatures that, when kicked, could let you essentially cast a spell.

I’ve always been a fan of utility, so I was intrigued by all the things that we could do with kicker. This brings me to the design of Lorwyn. As a designer, I love to take an existing mechanic and turn it on its head. There were kicker creatures that you could kick for an effect we’d put on a spell. What if I did the opposite and created spells you could kick to cast a creature? You could kick a spell to create a token, but that wasn’t what I was after. Tokens have to be pretty simplistic for memory reasons, and I was interested in more elaborate creature designs.

The earliest version of evoke went on instants and sorceries and turned the spell into a creature when kicked. I thought it was pretty cool. But as often happens, sometimes an idea runs into practicality problems. The game really doesn’t want instants and sorceries (which aren’t permenant types) on the battlefield, so the rules basically don’t allow it. If an instant or sorcery would enter the battlefield, the rules have you put it into your graveyard instead.

The rules text needed to prevent this (essentially having the creature lose its instant or sorcery type and become only a creature) was both lengthy and hard to understand. But the rules manager at the time, Mark Gottlieb, had another idea. What if instead of a spell, it was an enters ability on a creature spell. If you paid the evoke cost, which was usually cheaper, you’d sacrifice the creature when it entered. That was a lot less words. It wasn’t quite as cool, but the audience wouldn’t have interacted with the previous version, and the tweak played just as well. It still let you get a spell for a cheap cost or a creature with a spell-like effect for a higher cost.

Evoke was a pretty big hit, especially Mulldrifter, which went on to be an iconic Magic card. This brings me to the other fork of this story, another multicolor set: Ravnica: City of Guilds.

Multicolor sets are pretty popular, so it’s a theme we revisit often. Each time we do, I like to investigate unexplored design space for multicolor spells. What new things can we do with multicolor cards? Ravnica: City of Guilds gave the design team a new problem to chew on. Multicolor cards have the issue that they are very specific in terms of who can play them. If a card is white and blue, only a deck with white and/or blue resources can play it. Are there ways to make cards that are playable in one color but better if you have a second color?

Richard used Sedge Troll, a popular card from Limited Edition (Alpha), as a template.

Sedge Troll has what we call an off-color activated ability. You can play Sedge Troll in a red deck, but it’s better if you have access to black mana. In Constructed, you often don’t put a card like Sedge Troll in your deck if you aren’t playing both black and red. But in Limited, which has a lower power level and less cards, you will sometimes play the creature whose off-color activated ability you can’t utilized, especially if the creature is efficiently costed.

We thought about whether there was a way to have off-color abilities on a spell. There was. Invasion had done it with kicker costs, for example.

You could use Dismantling Blow in a mono-white deck to destroy an artifact or enchantment, but if you had access to blue mana you could also draw a card. Now, you couldn’t play it in a mono-blue deck as the spell requires white mana. In Constructed, like off-color activated abilites, you would generally only use the card if you had access to both colors. In Limited, sometimes you played these cards if you just had access to the first color. Ravnica: City of Guilds didn’t use kicker, so that was off the table. Was there a different way to do it?

The answer was yes. Instead of requiring mana of a certain color as an additional cost, we could just give you a bonus for using the secondary color when casting the spell. We ended up making a 20-card cycle with this ability in the original Ravnica: City of Guilds block. We made 20 because each guild had a spell going in each direction.

This takes us back to the design of Shadowmoor. We were looking for cool things to do with hybrid spells when we remembered this cycle from the Ravnica: City of Guilds block.

The result was a ten-card cycle with cards in Shadowmoor and Eventide. Each of these cards has a hybrid mana cost. You get two different effects depending on which color you use. Like the spells from the Ravnica: City of Guilds block, they were not tied to one of the colors. A green-blue hybrid spell can be played in a mono-green or mono-blue deck but works optimally in a deck with both colors.

This brings me back to Lorwyn Eclipsed. One of the challenges of trying to bring back four sets worth of designs in a single set requires finding opportunities to fit as much as we can while leaving room to explore new things. One of the ways to do this involves combining ideas. This allows us to call back to multiple things at once. It also gets to count as something new as you are combining in such a way to create something that hasn’t existed before. Finally, one of the big innovations of Lorwyn Eclipsed was the commingling of Lorwyn and Shadowmoor, which allowed us to mix mechanics from the two mini-blocks and create more mechanical space.

That’s how the mythic rare cycle of Elemental Incarnations came to be. We wanted to bring back evoke in some way. Evoke requires creatures to have an enters effect (or something similar). What if we mixed evoke from the Lorwyn mini-block with the hybrid spells from the Shadowmoor mini-block? This would now allow for several more outcomes (you could get either or both spell effects, with or without a creature). It would mix Lorwyn and Shadowmoor in a fun way, cross the streams to play up the new creative twist of the setting, create something new, and call back to different things.

The key to designing them involves picking two abilities, one in each color, that were useful independently but synergistic together. For example, Deceit‘s blue ability returns a nonland permanent to its owner’s hand, while the black ability allows you to force the discard of a nonland card. Each is useful in a vacuum but combine to do something hard for blue or black to do by themselves.

The Callback Is Coming from Inside the House

That’s all the stories I have to tell. I hope you enjoyed this two-part article looking at the history of how some Lorwyn Eclipsed cards came to be. As always, I’m eager for any feedback, be it on this article, any of the cards I talked about, or Lorwyn Eclipsed itself. You can email me or contact me through social media (Bluesky, Tumblr, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter).

Join me next week for another installment of Making Magic.

Until then, may you create many stories about Lorwyn Eclipsed.