Magic the Gathering: New Lorwyn Cards!
We got a leak of four new Lorwyn Eclipsed (ECL) cards today! In the interest of practicing a bit of off-the-cuff writing, I wanted to take the time and talk about my favourites.
These were posted onto Reddit, and all four are really interesting cards with a lot of play to them and gorgeous art. Here's a bit about two:
Mutable Explorer
Mutable Explorer {3}{G}
Creature -- Shapeshifter
When this creature enters, create a tapped Mutavault Token.
1/1
In Competitive
This one scares me a bit, but it also invites a lot of potential brews. In Pioneer right now, both B/X Demons and Mono-Red Mice make fantastic use of Mutavault as a synergy piece to enable the powerful triggered abilities of Unholy Annex and Manifold Mouse. Having synergy pieces in their landbase allow both of these decks to grind further into the late game, and gives them both inevitability. Mutavault dodges some key removal like Abrupt Decay and Brazen Borrower, and only slow decks currently run much land destruction in the format. This makes Mutavault a crucial enabler for multiple tiered strategies, being both difficult to interact with and powerful in its own right.
Mutable Explorer being a changeling itself and creating Mutavault tokens means that it can do a few things:
- Ramp: We've already seen cards like Overlord of the Hauntwoods do incredibly powerful things in Standard and Pioneer, as its ETB value is sufficient at 3 mana to be playable, and the threat of other synergies in addition pushes it over the top. Everywhere tokens are better than Mutavault tokens for enabling multicolored decks, but this still triggers token synergies and creates mana advantage.
- Typal Enabler: for decks like Golgari Demons, Mutable Explorer allows for the Demons player to functionally create two demons at once. Explorer itself will be a demon thanks to changeling, and then if it's removed, the demons player can animate its Mutavault token (even if it's tapped, barring some functional change between Mutavault and Mutavault tokens) for redundancy. Pioneer Demons already plays cards as bad as Blade of the Oni, so this could be an upgrade.
- Wears Pants: This is tertiary, but I think there's a chance Explorer proves powerful not just because of its typal synergy and ramp, but because it creates two bodies (one of which dodges removal). As a threat, it's slow and small, but for decks that care about going wide with counters or similar, and want some sort of creature land, this could fit in to decks that otherwise would struggle to justify a colorless or tapped land.
Overall, extremely cool card but one that I think could prove obnoxious in the right shell. I'll certainly try brewing with it (currently thinking Gruul Mice with a counters subtheme?), and pushing Pioneer Demons out of Red would be a good change, but Mutavault is not my favourite card and having more of it might give me hives.
The Flavour
Felicita Sala is new to Magic, and primarily illustrates children's books. Their work has a whimsical chaos that suits Magic well, especially Lorwyn, and Mutable Explorer is certainly no exception! The little gremlin is adorable, and suits the Lorwyn aesthetic as a place of whimsy contrasted with a bit of fantastical horror. The linework and color makes the card distinctive and doesn't distract from the text as a game piece, and is the exact sort of card that people want to play just because they get to play a little green gremlin friend with beady yellow eyes. I'm a big fan.
The special treatment frames aren't my favourite (I generally try to run the current standard frames as much as possible), but it works well here and unlike some previous special treatments, frames the artwork well without distracting from it. It's not my favourite, but it works well and it's one of the better frames we've seen.
Bitterbloom Bearer
Bitterbloom Bearer {B}{B} Creature -- Faerie Rogue
Flash
Flying
At the beginning of your upkeep, you lose 1 life and create a 1/1 blue and black Faerie creature token with flying.
1/1
In Competitive
Another riff on a powerful older card, Bitterbloom Bearer is Bitterblossom on a stick. Bitterblossom is a commander favourite and many moons ago a Standard demon. Bitterblossom is a strong enabler for Faerie typal synergies, and is a midrange, tempo, or control wincon in grindy metas. Bearer looks to do the same, but fits a bit differently into the play pattern of a Faeries deck.
Where Bitterblossom was an enchantment, Bearer is a 1/1 creature and that is a very crucial difference in modern magic. As threats have become increasingly pushed, "dies to Doomblade" has become something of a force of nature in competitive formats. If your threat doesn't create some sort of value or get completely out of hand in a single turn cycle, it can be difficult to find a place for it. Cards like Ouroboroid work because even a single trigger can win you the game, and a second almost certainly does. Cards like DSK's Overlords are powerful in large part because they have immense ETB value, and 'recur' into late game threats. Vivi, Cori-Steel Cutter, and Enduring Curiosity all often offer only a single window to deal with them cleanly before they begin generating value. Under this paradigm, Bitterbloom Bearer is going to have a hard time.
That said, its not as though incremental value creatures can't be played. Famously, Sheoldred was dismissed by many under the boot of "dies to Doomblade". Cards like Mosswood Dreadknight and decks like Standard's Selesnya Cage have demonstrated that strategies using slow incremental value or go-wide strategies with many minor threats can work. Bearer seems to fit into these strategies. The tokens make good ninjutsu fodder for Pioneer tempo lists and Kaito as well.
Crucially, flash gives Bearer the opportunity to come into play at endstep and immediately get value, creating two bodies at the start of turn three while holding up removal turn two. Spell Stutter will be in standard another year longer when ECL releases, so playing Bearer as a threat in a Dimir tempo shell would work. Unfortunately, WOE's other faerie typal synergies tend to be blue or require multiple turn cycles to see meaningful value so it's unclear to me whether WOE's faerie suite will be sufficient to elevate ECL's if ECL doesn't offer enough by itself.
The Flavour
...is fantastic! Bitterblossom is a wonderfully evocative card (faeries guarding poisonous flowers that serve as their own lifecycle is so damn cool), and Bitterbloom Bearer shows another side of that tidbit of lore. Faeries are such a classic fantasy trope and while some may roll their eyes at it being something so rote (especially coming from EOE, which was a whole genre away!), I'm a real sucker for more traditional fantasy and love the dark fairy tale vibes of Lorwyn. For me, faeries are a huge part of that and one of the biggest incentives for me to consider playing Dimir.
Taryn Knight is another new comer to MTG and, like Sala, is a children's book illustrator. What I said about Mutable Explorer carries over in full, and I continue to love the whimsy of these special treatments. Lorwyn's faeries towing the line between beautiful otherworldly women and mantis-like insects is a wonderful motif and one that captures the essence of the creepy old folk tales that serve as the inspiration.
Is it January yet?
There are many reasons to want 2025 to come to a close. These are difficult times, and many of my hobby spaces have been dominated by discussion of tariffs killing boutique hobby businesses, lack of funds for prizing and travel for events, or the ever-greater influence of corporate. Magic certainly has not been an exception. Diving into Magic so late in the game (I started only a couple years ago now) has been a bit of a roller coaster. I'm not one for cross overs in the best of times, and having one of my newer hobbies taken over by Final Fantasy, Marvel, and whatever else has been a bit of a trial. Lorwyn promises something that I can really throw myself into fully, and while EOE was pretty cool, I have really struggled to feel much excitement for Magic since TDM. I'm feeling optimistic and furiously burrowing my head in the sand in hopes time passes faster the rest of this year.
Also, Spellstutter Sprite reprint? Please? With the original art?