Lorwyn Eclipsed’s many tribes complicate Sealed and Draft play

Published 4 days ago, Polygon reports that Magic: The Gathering’s new set Lorwyn Eclipsed is built around typal strategies and that asking a single 273-card set to support eight creature tribes plus a Vivid multicolor payoff has harmed the Limited experience. The set includes merfolk, kithkins, elementals, fairies, treefolk, giants, elves and goblins, and the piece says that support is so spread out that rares and mythics in Sealed often don’t synergize.

A Sealed deck uses the cards from six closed packs plus any basic lands, and the writer found it hard to reliably build focused decks; they noted that previous sets sometimes used seeded boosters (for example, character-themed kits in Avatar: The Last Airbender) to smooth prerelease Sealed, which Lorwyn Eclipsed lacks.

In the set’s official presentation there are five main typal archetypes for Limited—merfolk, kithkins, elementals, goblins and elves—while the writer also describes five more archetypes as “hidden” and harder to draft or build. The reporter said they opened four Sealed pools and often gravitated to Vivid multicolor piles to play the best cards available, with occasional spikes when synergies emerged (they cited interactions with the Blight mechanic).

Key Topics

Culture, Lorwyn Eclipsed, Sealed Deck, Limited Draft, Blight Mechanic, Merfolk