Movements in Modern From Lorwyn Eclipsed
Hello everyone! Happy Wednesday! Today’s article takes a look at some notable price movements among
Let’s not waste any time and dive right in!
Moonshadow
One of the early spoilers for the set showed us Moondshadow, which folks compared rightly to [card]Death's Shadow[/card] in terms of its form/function. The difference between these two lies in how their power and toughness scales. Death’s Shadow necessitates that your life total be sufficiently low enough for it to enter with greater than one power or toughness, while Moonshadow can simply be played on turn one and gets power and toughness back each time a permanent card is put into your graveyard.
As it turns out, in this day and age, it’s easier to force permanents to your graveyard than it is to induce self life-loss, making Moonshadow a little bit faster for all intents and purposes. Cycling [card]Street Wraith[/card] triggers Moonshadow. Sacrificing [card]Mishra's Bauble[/card] triggers Moonshadow. Surveiling off of an
Even cracking a Fetchland triggers Moonshadow. Overall, it’s not hard at all to make Moonshadow become a 7/7 attacker by the time turn two rolls around. All of these features make it strictly better than Death’s Shadow, and actually pushes “Shadow”-style decks back into the realm of playability.
For what it’s worth, the Golgari Aggro shells that are running Moonshadow are also running Death’s Shadow. Typically these shells run four Moonshadows and three or four Death’s Shadows, making for incredible redundancy that these shells typically have lacked.
While it's early into the post-Lorwyn meta, there’s reason to believe that Moonshadow will push “Shadow” shells back into relevance and have an impact on the meta. Will it have a large impact? Too soon to tell, but I do believe in Moonshadow and it would appear that the market does too as it sits currently at $20 a piece and looks to be stabilizing around that price point.
| Moonshadow | ||
| Moonshadow (Showcase) | ||
| Moonshadow (0396) (Showcase) (Fracture Foil) |
Wistfulness
Wistfulness is yet another new evoke Elemental that, like [card]Deceit[/card], is seeing its fair share of exploration in the Modern format. Wistfulness has two abilities depending on the mana paid into it: if GG was paid, you can exile an artifact or enchantment in play, while if UU was paid for it, you can draw two cards and discard a card.
The versatility of these new Elementals offers a general appeal that one would want from most evoke creatures. Up to this point, the traditional evoke Elementals were free, and replicated cards like [card]Duress[/card] (in the case of [card]Grief[/card]) or [card]Swords to Plowshares[/card] in the case of [card]Solitude[/card]–in the cases of Grief and [card]Fury[/card], they have proven too lopsidedly powerful for the Modern format and found themselves on the Modern banned list, and are likely to never return.
Wistfulness offers the perfect combination of card draw and spot removal to make it a strong candidate for inclusion in [card]Living End[/card] shells. It can remove a pesky stax piece post-board, while also being a six-power creature that can wreak havoc and close games quickly if a Living End resolves a la [card]Shardless Agent[/card] or [card]Halo Forager[/card].
Sultai Living End shells haven’t gotten a huge boost in some time–in fact, one could argue that the most impactful thing Living End has seen in years were the original evoke Elementals. The card draw that Wistfulness offers also is not trivial in a shell that traditionally struggles with card draw outside of cycling creatures.
Pair this with [card]Subtlety[/card] and [card]Endurance[/card], of which it can be pitched to satisfy their individual evoke costs, and you have an easy synergy piece that doubles as value and removal that you can slot in at a pretty low opportunity cost.
Will this card bring Living End back into relevance? Maybe. Tough to say for sure, but it’s a much-needed boost. You might see its price tag of $28 or so and ask yourself “How?” but let me remind you that while Wistfulness may not be breaking the mold significantly in Modern (yet), it is a Standard all-star, so a significant amount of its demand is coming from that environment. Keep an eye on this though!
| Wistfulness | ||
| Wistfulness (Borderless) |
Birthing Ritual and Chthonian Nightmare
And now we circle back to a card that has long been on the edge of playability. Birthing Ritual was a crowd-pleasing rebalance of [card]Birthing Pod[/card] that costs 1-2 less mana to play than pod and has the ability to trigger for free each end step. The limiting factors of Ritual compared to Pod, however, are that it’s not reusable (although, one could have multiple Birthing Rituals in play and thus have multiple end step triggers), and you could only look at the top seven cards of your deck, not through your entire library.
Again, there’s some give and take in this card’s design that has given brewers a lot to think about, but unfortunately, no Birthing Ritual deck has ever really stuck. Enter Lorwyn Eclipsed and the slough of new Goblins like
The general outlines of these Jund Goblin decks look super fun, and take advantage of enter and leave abilities along with the recursiveness that Chthonian Nightmare offers to overwhelm the board state, put significant damage on the board, and deprive opponents of resources with very few spells cast most of the time.
The potential with this shell has Birthing Ritual moving meaningfully upward in price for the first time in what feels like years (but in reality has only been a few months). Nightmare on the other hand remains at bulk bin status, although, to me, feels incredibly undervalued. I’d argue both Ritual and Nightmare have significant upward potential in this shell or similar compatible typal shells post-Lowryn.
| Birthing Ritual | ||
| Birthing Ritual (Borderless) | ||
| Chthonian Nightmare | ||
| Chthonian Nightmare (Retro Frame) | ||
| Chthonian Nightmare (Borderless) |
Going Forward
Today’s article details in my mind the true value around Lorwyn Eclipsed that’s finally being realized post-release. While the set as a whole hasn’t been the most impactful for Modern, it’s done what I wish more sets would do: reinvigorate existing archetypes.
All the cards discussed today haven’t warped the meta or made existing meta decks better by any stretch of the imagination, rather they have given new life to Death’s Shadow and Living End shells, and have given brewers an excuse to build and play decks with both Birthing Ritual and Chthonian Nightmare–two of the coolest cards from
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Corey Williams
Corey Williams is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Shippensburg University in Shippensburg, Pennsylvania. He considers himself a macroeconometrician with his research body reflecting work in applied macroeconomics and econometrics. Corey is an L1 Judge who started playing Magic around Eighth Edition. He enjoys Modern, Commander, cEDH, and cube drafting. Outside of Magic, he loves running, teaching, and the occasional cult movie.