Lorwyn Eclipsed Is Proof MTG Needs to Revisit the Block System

Last updated on January 13, 2026

Dawnhand Eulogist | Illustration by Evyn Fong

Let me preface everything I’m about to say by stating that I really enjoy what I’ve seen of Lorwyn Eclipsed so far. None of the opinions I’ll be laying out here are an indictment of the product we ended up getting, and power level aside, it feels to me like ECL delivered on the months’ worth of anticipation that it was built up on. So kudos to the team who worked on it, and here’s to hoping the Limited format plays out as promising as it looks.

That said, this set feels almost transient. Like a visit from your parents but they’re in a rush to get back home. Actually, maybe that’s a good thing for some people, but just imagine you like your parents for a minute and work with me here. Everything about ECL proper looks great, but everything external feels rushed, and just proves to me that Magic could spend a little bit more time investing into its own planes.

Total Eclipse of My Heart

Morningtide's Light | Illustration by Mark Poole

Lorwyn Eclipsed has a colossal job to do. It needs to pack four set’s worth of callbacks from the original Lorwyn block into a single Magic release, all while feeling like it’s doing something new and exciting for a mid-2020s Magic set.

While I feel like the set ultimately achieves that goal, it just feels like too much is being crammed into one set, and I would’ve loved to see ECL given the Midnight Hunt/Crimson Vow treatment and instead show up as two separate sets (Return to Lorwyn and Return to Shadowmoor — working titles).

It makes a lot of sense for this set specifically. The whole premise of the original block was that players were spending time on a plane with a day/night dynamic that caused it to undergo a complete tonal shift mid-block, and that allowed the designers to explore mirrored themes, like tapping vs untapping, +1/+1 counters vs. -1/-1 counters, and all the aesthetic shifts that cross over from Morningtide to Eventide.

Lorwyn Eclipsed captures a lot of this, but has to do so in a solitary set release, which means everything’s running up against each other. It maintains a lot of the tapping shenanigans with merfolk, but doesn’t play into untapping as much. It completely foregoes +1/+1 counters since WotC doesn’t like to intermingle them with -1/-1 counters in the same Limited formats. The set does a good enough job capturing the day vs. night dynamic of some creatures, mainly on the transforming legends, but again, it makes the set feel very stuffed.

There’s also the matter of callbacks and referential card design. ECL is basically the “Friends Reunion” of MTG, where so much of it is playing on nostalgic beats from the original sets. You remember Thoughtseize? Well here’s the faerie from that original art on its own card. Remember Bitterblossom? We made it a creature this time! Haven’t played with Worm Harvest in a hot minute? Lluwen, Imperfect Naturalist has your back, sans retrace.

There’s definitely plenty of new in this set, but I can’t help but feel there’s too much source material here to properly explore everything this set wanted to explore.

Giants, faeries, and treefolk got sort of shafted in favor of the “main” archetypes. Maybe that was their role in the original sets too (I didn’t start playing until five years after Lorwyn), but it just feels like another set could’ve done wonders to flesh out those creature types, too.

Some of the returning mechanics aren’t fully explored, either. It’s fine to have conspire cameo on a single card (Raiding Schemes), but that’s such a cool mechanic to just gloss over with a one-off 20 years after it debuted. It’s probably for the best that we didn’t get a huge batch of persist cards, and I like the evolution of champion into behold, but I wouldn’t have minded seeing new reinforce cards, or clash, or kinship, or chroma. Okay, maybe not chroma. And before you tell me those mechanics weren’t great, remember how Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty treated channel and turned it into something playable.

This set had to debut new mechanics, too. I love what they did with -1/-1 counters and blight, and I’m excited to play with those cards. And vivid’s pretty elegant, too, with tons of hybrid support. But dedicating so much space to those new mechanics leaves only so much room to explore the old stuff, and it leaves me feeling like some amount of stuff was simply “left out” or “didn’t make the cut”. We somehow had to make room for an entire cycle of Strixhaven students, too, which feels very out of place if you’re not actively following the lore.

Back to Blocks?

Celestial Reunion | Illustration by Justin Gerard

Look, I don’t need or necessarily want every set to be a full 3-set block like it used to be, but I’d love to see a little more time spent with planes that deserve multiple sets, especially if we can cram 6-7 new Standard releases into a single year.

Look at Edge of Eternities. That set took place in outer-freaking-space, man. It’s a setting of galactic proportions, and we spent two and a half months there and moved on. Sure, we might see it again soon, but when are we revisiting the plane of Lorwyn again? At this rate, it’ll be 2045 before we see another kithkin printed. And what of sets like Aetherdrift? That was the first time players got to properly play on Muraganda, and it was literally a third of a single set release. Amonkhet and Avishkar felt like mere cameos, when there are plenty of players who’d like to see a full return visit to those settings. The point is, we’re not giving MTG’s planes their due, and we could stand to stay on some planes for more than one set. At least for releases where it makes sense to do so, like ECL.

And it’s not like we’re sticking with this set for that long, either. I was shocked to see that the Mastery Pass for ECL on MTG Arena only goes up to 40 levels. That’s an indicator that the set’s going to come and go in no time, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is going to knock it off shelves in just over a month’s time.

Which is a whole different problem in and of itself. I don’t want to bring a lot of anti-Universes Beyond energy to this topic, but one of the biggest knocks against UB is how it eats into Magic’s ability to tell its own stories and invest proper time into its own worldbuilding. Final Fantasy and Avatar: The Last Airbender absolutely killed it on multiple fronts, and I’m glad we got those sets, but if the reason I’m not getting a standalone Shadowmoor set is because we had to make room for Master Splinter and pizza basics, then I just can’t fully back UB. Instead of nostalgia-baiting me with TMNT and whatever the hell Spooder-Man was, at least Nostalgia-bait me with more MTG goodies like Lorwyn Eclipsed.

Not every set needs to be block structured. A one-set check-in on certain planes works perfectly fine for me. Wilds of Eldraine, Tarkir: Dragonstorm, and The Lost Caverns of Ixalan are recent examples of “return sets” that didn’t overstay their welcome, and Murders at Karlov Manor would’ve been made worse if we’d spent even more time there. But Lorwyn Eclipsed has so many things going for it that would’ve made for a great 2-set block: The night/day dynamic, the juxtopositioning of the original block’s sets, the “crowded” feeling that ECL ended up having, and the amount of time that’s passed since we last visited the plane, coupled with the amount of time that’ll pass before we’re likely to see it again.