Most Expensive Lorwyn Eclipsed Card Gets Multi-Format Hype

Last updated on January 20, 2026

Moonshadow | Illustration by Olivier Bernard

Moonshadow is Lorwyn Eclipsed’s most expensive, non-Showcase preorder card at $30 on TCGPlayer.com due to its potential in Modern and EDH. The Death's Shadow riff is a staggering 1-mana 7/7 that balances itself by entering with 6 -1/-1 counters. These counters are removed as permanents enter your graveyard—or with the aid of several potential combos.

Modern’s Next Toy

Stinkweed Imp | Illustration by Nils Hamm

Most of the Moonshadow hype is for Modern, with players itching to use this card as a cheap, oversized beater that’s hard to block due to menace. Part of the card’s potential rests with fetch lands, that integral part of the format. Because Moonshadow’s second ability sees lands, cracking a fetch removes a counter. That gets you a 1-mana 2/2 with menace attacking turn 2.

Moonshadow doesn’t care what the zone the permanent cards enter the graveyard from, just that they hit the bin. That allows players to grow Moonshadow via discard outlets and self-mill—a potentially potent combination for dredge. Consider: Turn 1 Moonshadow, turn 2 Cathartic Reunion, discarding at least one dredge creature like Stinkweed Imp, then dredging another creature and attacking for 4 with Moonshadow. This lends itself well to a hyper-aggressive strategy exploiting cards like Vengevine; that elemental wants to be paired with discard effects and creatures like Basking Broodwalla and Hollow One. With the unbanning of Faithless Looting, a deck like this could be primed to succeed.

Another route with Moonshadow uses combos rather than spending turns removing the counters. Cards in Modern that facilitate this include Vampire Hexmage and Dress Down. While these cards require a greater mana investment and committing multiple cards to a single creature, they also produce a significant, hard to block threat that ends the game in a few combats. Another potential card is Hapatra's Mark, which doubles as a protection spell to get around Moonshadow’s primary weakness.

Moonshadow’s primary weakness is its vulnerability. While a 1-mana 1/1, it dies to most removal spells, including but not limited to Fatal Push, Phalge, Titan of Fire's Fury, Orcish Bowmasters, and so on. Without a combo, it needs to sit in play for a few turns to realize its potential; with combos, that Fatal Push stings all the more (though they save it from much damage-based removal). Whether this keeps it from seeing any play is a matter to be settled after the set comes out, but it bears remembering when playtesting.

Commander’s Synergy Card

Xu-Ifit, Osteoharmonist | Illustration by Michael Ivan

A potential early beater is much less impressive in Commander, but that doesn’t mean Moonshadow doesn’t have potential in the format. Commander players care less about the creature’s aggro potential than its size-power ratio, which is immense and incredibly useful for cards power-matters cards.

An easy benefactor from Moonshadow is Sarkhan's Unsealing, which turns casting Moonshadow into a one-sided board wipe. Some commanders that benefit from its stats include Coram, the Undertaker and Xu-Ifit, Osteoharmonist. It’s worth noting that it does not perform better than Death's Shadow in these instances, as the OG has far more power and toughness, but a redundant copy rarely hurts in the singleton format.

Note that cards that care about creatures entering, or you controlling large creatures, don’t work with Moonshadow; it enters play as a 1/1, so you can’t trigger Garruk's Uprising, Vaultborn Tyrant, and similar effects without a combo.

The cards mentioned as combos in the Modern section also work with Moonshadow in Commander, and could be useful at making it a decent threat: Even Commander players must respect a 7/7. But a potential combo card that isn’t Modern legal yet perfect for EDH is Mutated Cultist, an eldrazi that removes counters from a permanent and reduces the cost of your next spell by that much mana. The cost reduction only works for generic costs, but that still has lots of potential considering that the Cultist effectively adds six mana for a super-ritual. When the stars align, that’s a turn 3 Chimil, the Inner Sun or God-Pharaoh's Statue, a turn 6 Portal to Phyrexia. And while the stars don’t align that often, Mutated Cultist is potent enough card to build around, and use Moonshadow as but a single enabler.

Moonshadow has received immense hype as a potential build-around, and I can’t wait to see what players build with it. A card that has potential is far more interesting than something like Nadu, Winged Wisdom that’s flat broken, so hopefully Wizards prints more build-around like this in the future.