Jeremy Geist

Thanks to @moxserra.bsky.social, @megansmith13.bsky.social, @melissadetora.bsky.social, and @jeremygeist.bsky.social for Time Walking with me today and to @aryawrites.bsky.social for setting the whole thing up. Follow them and learn more about Trans Lifeline, the cause we were supporting, below.

I'm raising money with some fellow designers to support Trans Lifeline! If you have a burning design question you want answered, check out our stream and make a donation! tiltify.com/@hogpog-98/w...

Magic: The Gathering® | Marvel's Spider-Man and Pick-Two Draft What do you get when you combine a brand-new draft format with a universe of Spider-Heroes? For Corey Bowen, you get an exciting challenge for a draft designer.

Check out this article by @coreyjbowen.bsky.social about designing Spider-Man's Pick-2 draft! There's tons of stuff to learn about our design process and SPM's set structure! #wotcstaff magic.wizards.com/en/news/feat...

There's some really cool mechanics and individual cards coming next year and I can't wait to see what you think about them!

The 2026 sets getting announced means it's time for me to brag about the sets I worked on! #wotcstaff

🧚 LORWYN ECLIPSED: Vision, Set
🦸 MARVEL SUPER HEROES: Exploratory, Vision (Strong Second)
⁉️ REALITY FRACTURE: Exploratory, Vision (Strong Second), Set
🖖 STAR TREK: Exploratory, Vision, Set

We eventually settled for singling out warped cards in the text of the void effect, which is wordy and inelegant but allowed both mechanics to follow whatever timings they want. Void also went from caring about creatures and artifacts to any nonland permanent at some point

However, warped cards leave the battlefield at the beginning of your end step, which means that end-step void effects won't see them, which is both frustrating and unintuitive. We tried making warp cards exile at the end of your combat, but that made the timing a lot more annoying for that mechanic

Being able to access void effects on your end step is an important design tool for this kind of mechanic – it allows players to play the card whenever they want on their turn and in general makes keeping track of effects easier

...that said, while void never changed substantially, there was certainly a lot of debate over the small details. Void's biggest issue was its coexistence with warp, which ostensibly synergized with it but had weird timing issues

1. Andrew Brown, the set lead, recommended we use a morbid variant. It playtested well. THE END

My final thread on #MTGEternities is about void! Void has a very lengthy development history, and I hope I have time to capture it all! #wotcstaff

Oh yeah you finally reminded me to show you this video

If there's one thing I like doing it's coming up with names for design concepts 🫡

I am so happy Kill-Ship deals 10 damage instead of destroying, those little touches are important

I was the only big anime fan on the team, and though I have seen part of Outlaw Star, for some reason the only space opera anime I could think of at the time was Legend of the Galactic Heroes

Can you put *NSYNC on the deck box and sleeves please

Unending Whisper, Colossal Plow, Wash Away immediately come to mind as cool stuff you can do in the format

Warp is also a highly textured mechanic – it works with effects that care about things entering or leaving the battlefield, "cast from exile" synergies, station, flicker effects, checking for high power or mana value, and so on. A perfect mechanic to center an entire set around!

The Magic: the Gathering card "Manifest Dread".

The Magic: the Gathering card "Hand That Feeds".

The Magic: the Gathering card "Splitskin Doll".

The Magic: the Gathering card "Oblivious Bookworm".

My most recent Magic design fixation is on "textured mechanics" – mechanics that have a lot of small facets that you can make other cards synergize with. Manifest Dread in DSK is a good example – it enabled graveyard, power-2, and face down decks that all looked pretty different from each other

The Magic: the Gathering card "All-Fates Stalker".

The Magic: the Gathering card "Bygone Colossus".

I'm really happy with how many ways we could figure out to make warp useful without giving the creature haste. Some of my favorites are All-Fates Stalker becoming a flicker effect if you warp it and Bygone Colossus inviting you to find stuff to do with it (its nickname in the pit was "Combo Golem")

Abro refined the mechanic into the version of Warp you see in the final version of EOE. It immediately proved super fun to play and we kept it in roughly the same version through the rest of design (though there was some discussion around its interaction with void – I'll get into that later)

Playtesting swiftly proved that the Towershell mechanic meant that a creature either could get infinite ETB triggers without repercussion or made it impossible for you to maintain a board presence. However, it did pique the interest of Andrew Brown, the eventual set design lead

I felt that Towershell's ability expressed the concept of a creature vanishing into hyperspace/warp speed and then arriving again next turn. There was only one problem: The mechanic was bad

The Magic: the Gathering card "Meandering Towershell".

The mechanic I submitted was based on...Meandering Towershell.

Warp's genesis was in early design explorations. The exile zone, flavor-wise, has been treated as the weirdo zone connected with the Blind Eternities, so for one homework assignment, everyone tried to design new mechanics that interacted with the exile zone in some way

The Magic: the Gathering card "Knight Luminary".

Today's #mtgeternities design thread is on Warp! You might be surprised to find out which card first inspired this mechanic... #wotcstaff

Clogged boards are also a fail state design-wise if there's no way to break the stall or they're so complicated it becomes difficult to process – creature sinks in a format help solve both of those issues

I wouldn't call battles creature sinks, since you still have to be able to "win" combat to interact with them. They were in flight and unreleased at the time EOE was in development so we didn't think about them that much. We didn't feel DFCs were conceptually necessary so we didn't think about them

Why, it's Wobbles the goose!

It's played pretty fun, 4 mana and 2 life is a steep enough price to pay that you'd rather be doing something other than blitzing out Underdog if you have the option, but it helps resolve board states where nobody has anything to do