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Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast

#1311: Lorwyn Eclipsed Creative with Neale LaPlante Johnson

Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast

Wizards of the Coast

Leisure, Game Design, Mtg, Duels Of The Planeswalkers, Games, Ccg, Mark Rosewater, Magic The Gathering

4.7801 Ratings

🗓️ 6 February 2026

⏱️ 33 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In this podcast, I sit down with Neale LaPlante Johnson, the creative lead of Lorwyn Eclipsed, to talk all about the worldbuilding for the set.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

I'm not pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for other drive to work at home edition.

0:07.4

So today, I have Neil LePont Johnson, who is the creative lead for Lorwyn Eclipse to talk all about the world building and creative of Lorwyn Eclipse.

0:19.3

Hello, Neil. This is Neil. Hey, Mark. I'm glad to be here again. As Mark said, I'm the creative lead of Lerwood Eclipse, and I couldn't be happier with the set and how fans are receiving it. So, great stuff. So the interesting, we're going to start a little different place today because I actually play a big role in the very early part of the story, and then we'll hand off to you in which I play a very small role, is I've been trying to get us to do Lorwyn for years.

0:47.3

And the pitch that I sort of came with was I knew that we didn't have space to do two different sets.

0:54.0

And because we had done a lot of worlds that were similar to Lorwin and Shadamor

0:58.0

individually, I felt really, really important that you needed to see both of them because

1:03.2

a lot of what, to me, defines Lorwyn is Shadamore.

1:06.6

And so I pitched the idea of, they start melding together, that the world is part Lorwin and part Shadamore. And so I pitched the idea of the, they start melding together, that the world is part

1:11.5

Lorwyn and part Shadamore.

1:14.4

And so that is, that is the pitch that I made for years, and it wasn't until Kamagawa

1:20.0

did well that we made a, we put Lorwin on some thing we asked the public, and it scored

1:25.4

really well on that, and that finally got us to do it.

1:28.5

So I do know when you guys started that the one given was it's Lorwyn plus Chathamor.

1:33.7

That was the one starting off point.

1:36.7

So what did you guys do with that?

1:40.9

So basically we had to kind of conceive of what the world would be if it was just like both of these things mixed.

1:48.2

I think the interesting tension of the original Lorwood and Shadowmore blocks was, you know, when it became night, essentially you switch to your Shadowmore form.

1:56.7

And when it became day, you switched to your Lorwyn form.

1:59.9

And that would happen, you know, but you can only be one or the other.

2:02.7

And you didn't really know about, unless you were one of the main characters from, you know,

2:06.5

the narrative or Una, you didn't really know that that was happening.

2:10.2

And so we thought that that proposal sounded really interesting from it like an ideological

...

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