Playing with Lorwyn Eclipsed feels bitter-sweet. It’s everything I love about Magic, but it feels more ephemeral than ever – and it deserves more. We deserve more. This is why Lorwyn deserved another set to shine this year.
LORWYN ECLIPSED
I went to the Lorwyn prerelease this weekend, and it very much felt like something special was in the air. There was the typical mix of invested and newer players, but even the newer players were on a similar wavelength to the veterans when it came to the atmosphere around Lorywn Eclipsed. They were quietly excited, fans of the fantasy creature types that would be in the set. They spoke to me about their Commander decks – Demons, Elves, Goblins, Faeries – and shared how this was a highlight on the calendar for them. My prerelease slot was the Sunday one, and for many of the newer players, this wasn’t their first of the weekend. There was a lot of love for Lorwyn in the air.
This was ever more apparent when I chatted to another player who was there with a friend for Two-Headed Giant. His friend wanted to play, but the main event was sold out. So, he roped in a friend who hadn’t played Magic since university. While we bantered back and forth about the quantity of text on a card in 2026 – and the lack of vanilla commons – I could tell that despite the long break, my opponent was really enjoying some classic Magic: the Gathering.
And that’s just it, isn’t it? Lorwyn Eclipsed is much more than a Magic set. It’s much more than a return to Lorwyn. It’s something of a poster child for “real” Magic.
WHY DOES LORWYN ECLIPSED MATTER SO MUCH?
Before we delve further into the set itself, let’s get the elephant in the room out of the way first – the release schedule.
It’s heavily lopsided toward Universes Beyond, and would have been more so if Lorwyn Eclipsed wasn’t pushed back out of 2025 to try and balance out the year. For a great many Magic players, that schedule looks like a few months of Lorwyn, a brief visit to Strixhaven, and then nothing until Halloween. That’s a pretty barren year if you’re not interested in TMNT, Marvel, The Hobbit, or Star Trek.
I can’t profess to love Universes Beyond, but I do quite like it when it’s done right and resonates with what I love about Magic. For me thus far, that mostly means Tales of Middle-Earth and Final Fantasy, for the most part, with the Warhammer 40k Commander decks not far behind – though I do think Avatar was pretty well done. Even the Lord of the Rings set felt a bit weak to me, though. It felt very Americanized generic fantasy, lacking a lot of the whimsy and wonder and grand scale of Tolkien. If anything, Lorwyn Eclipsed captures that vibe much more, which is not something I imagined I would be writing.
As such, I’m a little colder on The Hobbit than I thought I’d be, but I’m willing to be proven wrong. So believe me when I say that I’m fully on board with the current anxieties and criticisms about the release schedule.
Having a good balance of Magic original IP and UB properties is essential, and with two of the UB properties this year being pretty far away from the historical fantasy of classic Magic, and another (TMNT) being the second visit to New York in the space of a year, and one of two sets visiting New York in 2026, for a total of three New York sets.
Coming off of Spider-Man and Avatar – and the great but decidedly sci-fi Edge of Eternities – the return to Lorwyn is a welcome one for Magic players new and old who just want to enjoy some classic MtG.
WHAT MAKES LORWYN ECLIPSED SO GOOD
Lorwyn Eclipsed is a return to Magic as many of us know it.
It has great art, with many of the artists from the older sets returning to deliver new pieces. What’s more, artists who didn’t previously work on Lorwyn are delivering some outstanding pieces.
You can check this out in the Art & Worldbuilding video on the official channel, but suffice to say, they’ve captured something magical here.
The return to the traditional creature types is one aspect that helps propel ECL into the higher end of the year’s offerings for many folks, but it’s also what makes up the set.
Throwbacks to iconic cards are always fun to spot, and ECL has plenty of nods to nostalgia that are also just good to play with. Mechanics in the set feel like they give interesting options in Limited, too – though type-matters is a big part of the set, it’s leveraging the mechanics like Blight that really get the juices going.
With four original sets to draw from (Lorwyn, Shadowmoor, Morningtide and Eventide), at times it feels like the set is trying to do too much, and that’s where the problems start to creep in.
WHY ONE SET ISN’T ENOUGH
ECL is trying to do too much in one set. I spoke about this issue with modern Magic set structure in my article “Why Avatar Feels like a Real Magic Set”. Without the ability to explore how a place exists in time, and how events change it to reach a new equilibrium – something very easy to do with the old block structure with multiple sets in a single plane – you tend to struggle to communicate a story.
I’ve played the prerelease and started working on my content for the set, and at this point, all I can tell you is that it’s an isekai story about Strixhaven students, and that the plane now has pockets of day and night with Shadowmoor and Lorwyn co-existing. What the greater conflict or resolution is, I couldn’t say (though Jacob can).
Storytelling is harder within one set, sure, it’s also a lot harder to pay enough respect to a plane like Lorwyn which had so many different creature types and mechanics on our first visit when you only have one set to do so.
The Lorwyn block introduced Champion, Changeling, Clash, Evoke, Hideaway, Kinship, Prowl, and Reinforce. It delivered Planeswalkers. Kindred (previously Tribal) was fleshed out massively, including lands oriented towards different creature types.
In the Shadowmoor sets, we got Chroma, Conspire, Persist, Retrace, and Wither. The untap symbol was introduced. Hybrid mana was also a big part of these two sets, along with filter lands, Demigods, Lieges, and modal spells.
Paying respect to all of this while also attempting to do something new is hard. Doing it in just one set is damn near impossible.
THE MONKEY PAW HAS CURLED
What’s more, two big changes the community has been clamoring for have been delivered with ECL and arguably with TDM and EOE – changes that involve the frequency of card types and product drops.
In ECL we got fewer Legendaries. The community has been actively campaigning for this, but the now familiar refrain of “the monkey paw curls” has played out. While Universes Beyond sets have ballooned the number of Legendaries, the attempt to rein them in has played out in in-universe sets. This means that Lorwyn Eclipsed features but sixteen Legendary Creatures.
When there are only this many – with four being Strixhaven visitors, and one a God – you end up sacrificing support for some of the more niche demands, like for a multicolor Kithkin or Merfolk Commander. While we see Merfolk a lot more often (In Ixalan, and Dominaria, and Eldraine) and have already had some Bant Merfolk printed for those who want to combine blue, green and white, it’s going to be a lot longer before we see Kithkin again.
What are Kithkin players meant to do without a three-color legendary Kithkin to lead their deck? It’s similar when it comes to Bre of Clan Stoutarm. While she and Brigid are both really cool and powerful designs, they don’t inherently have any synergies with Kithkin or Giants.
This could easily be solved by utilizing the other product line we get alongside Standard booster releases: Commander Decks. Yet, the decision was made to only deliver two Commander decks for Lorwyn Eclipsed, in the form of five-color Elementals and Jund -1/-1 Counters. This seems a bit of a misplay, if I’m honest, with such a rich and varied pool to draw from that could satisfy some of the demands of the wider casual playerbase.
END STEP
Lorwyn Eclipsed is a fantastic set that I’m looking forward to enjoying for the next few months. I’ll hit up a draft for the first time in a while, and likely grind it out on Arena. There are some sweet cards I’d like to grab for Commander, and overall I’m pretty happy with the set. That said, there are some glaring issues with trying to do justice to the original block, and some real missed opportunities.
What’s more, we got to go back to Lorwyn, but in January of a year that will be carried by UB hype. How will that end up reporting, in the grand scale of things? Wallets are already running low from the last couple of years of TCG bubbling across the spectrum, from Magic to Pokemon to One Piece, and so a post-Christmas set with a somewhat restrained level of power creep isn’t best placed to top the spreadsheets for the year. My hope is that it’s still somehow recorded as a success, because we kind of need it to be.
Kristen is Card Kingdom’s Head Writer and a member of the Commander Format Panel. Formerly a competitive Pokémon TCG grinder, she has been playing Magic since Shadows Over Innistrad, which in her opinion, was a great set to start with. When she’s not taking names with Equipment and Aggro strategies in Commander, she loves to play any form of Limited.