• In a few sentences, what is the premise of Gardens of Twilight Reach?

"A trick played at tea time, faeries dueling on a southern lawn, and archfey from across the Faeland’s myriad demiplanes revelling in trade and gossip. Gardens of Twilight Reach juxtaposes regency tropes upon a fairy-world backdrop to explore the relationship between the demands of high society and our most outlandish desires. Play matchmaker with Betrothals, spread your court’s influence with Color Counters, and flaunt obscene wealth with Graverob."

• What inspired you to begin creating Gardens of Twilight Reach?

"I had been holding onto the idea of using color counters in a custom set for over a year, but it wasn’t until I (re)watched Dimension 20’s “A Court of Fey and Flowers” that it all clicked into place for me. aCoFaF blew me away.  It was able to satirize the idea of polite society with entirely non-human characters. Birds, goblins, and even owlbears representing the capricious idle rich was compelling in a way that was unique, yet reproducible. Pulling from tales of fairy worlds (a midsommer night’s dream, alice in wonderland, the wizard of oz) as well as Regency narratives (pride and prejudice, Wuthering Heights, Bridgerton) allows me to take a top-down approach that can lean into one genre while turning the other on it’s ear."

• Where would you say Gardens of Twilight Reach is in the development process?

"Gardens of Twilight Reach is in a very exciting place; it’s in its infancy with lots of room for experimentation. As of now, the draft archetypes have been solidified and almost all of the commons are done. Designing a custom set is one big experiment so there’s still some very big questions that don’t have answers yet. Can color-shifting be the foundation for a limited archetype? What does a shard set look like when each shard is defined by its enemy color pair? I’m not sure yet, but I’m sure the results will be fascinating!"

• How does having color counters affect how the set is structured, and would you consider Gardens a multicolor-heavy set because of them?

"Color counters are fairly parasitic, they require lots of other cards that care about what colors things are. To complicate matters: certain colors are more likely to use them than others. Historically speaking, Blue can make anything any color, and green can make itself any color. The other colors are more limited. White could hypothetically purify something and make it white, while black might corrupt something to make it black. Red however, doesn’t care for color-shifting much. Reflecting this with color counters makes the set lopsided. Pursuing a “multicolor-matters” approach quickly became core to the set and introduced a unique opportunity: a set full of multicolor payoffs but with the standard amount of multicolor cards. Color counters and multicolor tokens become useful tools for resolving this inherent tension, and inspire a go-wide/go-tall draft dynamic across two archetypes. The UG archetype provides payoffs that want to be as many colors as possible, but GW wants to have many multicolor creatures. I think of this set like a “build-your-own multicolor” set."

• In your set notes, you note that Betrothal has read and played better than Soulbond. What was that testing process like, and how did it lead to Betrothal as it stands today?

"There’s a reason souldbond is a 9 on the storm scale. It was one of the first mechanical considerations for this set, but I think custom creators are more fond of it than the average player. A “fixed” soulbond was the germinating idea that eventually became Betrothals. My first playtests involved a “Propose” mechanic somewhere between Champion and Bestow. A creature with Propose could enter the battlefield exiled to another creature, or become exiled to a creature when a new one entered. Similar to soulbond, this took up a lot of text space, and a lot of cognitive load to remember triggers, as well as a host of balance issues. The most important advantage Propose had over Soulbond was that it tracked the relationship between the two cards better (one was exiled under another.) Reframing the problem as “how might I track a relationship between two cards” was my big breakthrough. Why not put the relationship itself on a card so that tracking it becomes trivial. I’ve always loved aura strategies, so designing a new take on multi-target auras was a blast. There’s some decent design space here. My first playtests with betrothal auras revealed two main takeaways: 

1. A deck focussed on betrothals doesn’t need many of them. They stick around longer than regular auras, and can’t be stacked on the same creature. The as-fan for betrothals needs to be kept low (and in fact, I’ve moved most of them up to uncommons and higher, similar to cases in MKM)

2. Betrothals need to encourage having two creatures enchanted. This isn’t a thematic consideration, but an issue of balance. Getting rid of a fully-stocked betrothal requires killing two creatures, a very tall hurdle. It needs to be easier to deal with the remaining creature when one of them dies."

• What is your favorite card in Gardens of Twilight Reach? 

"Speaking of betrothals... this happens to be my favourite card so far, and also gives me an opportunity to reveal unique the card frame for betrothals:"

• Would you like to give any special thanks to anyone on this server for their help?

"While not a member of our server, My first thanks has to go out to Andrew アンドリュー (https://x.com/ux_andrew) who built the Figma Library for magic cards that I use to design every card I make. 

I have so many people to thank who have given wonderful feedback like Janahwhamme, Viola, Ensorceler, Shpungo, Philippe Saner, Dodo Axolotl, Silas, Aserty, Dylan, Silver, and each and every person in project-design and feedback that showed interest in this effort. I’d also like to thank the incredible team who runs this server. Managing this many people is really hard and their efforts often go invisible to the rest of us."