A four-day spoiler season was always going to pass by in a flash, but even so, it’s incredible how fast Lorwyn Eclipsed previews have flown in. We’ve seen so many great cards so quickly, from fresh combo enablers to exciting Commander options, that it’s been hard to keep track of them all. Today’s last burst has been no different, with a ton of Lorwyn Eclipsed spoilers landing in rapid succession, including some very interesting support pieces for the new Blight mechanic. If the Blight Curse precon tickled your fancy, these should be right up your street.
Soul Immolation
Soul Immolation is a very rare thing for MTG: a truly one-sided board wipe. While we’ve seen these before with cards like Plague Wind, they tend to be incredibly expensive or specific. Immolation is just five mana, and its only condition is that you have a reasonably chunky creature on board.
Essentially, Immolation deals damage up to the highest toughness among your creatures to all of your opponents’ creatures, provided you’re willing to Blight for the same amount. The flexibility offered by the “up to” here is excellent right out of the gate, as it lets you scale the damage as needed.
On the subject of flexibility, it’s also well worth noting that you don’t have to Blight your highest-toughness creature itself. If you have a 5/5 and a 1/1 in play, for example, you can Blight 5 and put all of the -1/-1 counters on the 1/1, and still deal the full five damage.
Because of these options, Soul Immolation will likely be a deceptively powerful card. In any deck with reasonably-statted creatures, this can reliably clear out your opponents while leaving you in the driver’s seat. This is to say nothing of the many synergies the card enables in decks that care about -1/-1 counters, either. If you’re playing Blight Curse, or any deck like it, you’ll often get extra value on top of an already excellent effect here.
Glen Elendra Guardian
At a base level, Glen Elendra Guardian is a disruptive Faerie with Flash like the Spellstutter Sprites of old. You can essentially treat it like a more flexible counterspell for noncreature spells, flashing it in and removing the counter all in one to prevent a key play. You can also parcel out the cost over multiple turns, if you don’t mind giving your opponent a chance to play around it.
By itself, this is interesting, if a little mana-intensive for constructed formats. Where things get really intriguing here, however, is when you add some Blight cards into the mix. When you can top Guardian up with fresh counters regularly, it becomes a way to prevent your opponent from ever casting a noncreature again. Blight tends to put counters on at a good rate, but it’s worth noting that any counters will work here. If you have easy ways to place other counters, like Agatha’s Soul Cauldron, you can pursue those routes too.
Giving your opponent a free draw in exchange for countering their spell is a notable downside here, but you can actually spin it into an upside in the right strategy. Decks like Nekusar, the Mindrazer will love piling on some extra damage, for example. You can also counter your own spells if you need to cycle them, which is particularly good with zero-mana artifacts and the like.
Shadow Urchin
The obvious application for Shadow Urchin is to Blight a 1/1 token each turn to ‘draw’ an extra card, which is slow but fine. The fact that there’s no upper limit here makes it really exciting, however. If you Blight 5 with Soul Immolation, for example, Urchin will give you access to five fresh cards. You can also sacrifice creatures that enter with a ton of counters, like Moonshadow, for even more explosive draw. Nine-Lives Familiar is a particularly scary pairing, potentially drawing you 45 cards over eight turns.
As with Guardian, Urchin doesn’t care about the type of counter you place, either. It makes a great addition to decks running Modular cards for that reason, and probably enables some nasty combos with Arcbound Ravager in particular. As long as you have a reliable way to get rid of your becountered creatures, like a sacrifice outlet, this is a very exciting new draw engine for Rakdos.
Wild Unraveling
Of all the new Lorwyn Eclipsed spoilers dealing with Blight today, Wild Unraveling probably has the most multi-format potential. Original Counterspell hasn’t been Standard-legal since Seventh Edition in 2021, and this is pretty darn close to it. Provided you’ve got a creature you’re willing to sacrifice, it’s essentially the same card. Decks like Dimir Midrange could well end up testing it, since their creature density supports it well.
Even more interesting are the implications this card has for Pauper. The best deck in the format right now is Mono-Blue Terror by a wide margin, which already plays four base Counterspell. It also runs a bunch of creatures that are great for Blighting onto. You can Blight 2 with Murmuring Mystic twice without losing much value, for example, and you can Blight your Tolarian Terrors in a pinch. I could easily see players subbing out the likes of Force Spike and Dispel for this in a few weeks, due to the greater flexibility it offers.
In Commander Wild Unraveling is much less exciting, unfortunately. Most decks only play a few counterspells at most, and those tend to be those you can cast for free, like Force of Negation or Fierce Guardianship. That said, the ‘sacrifice’ angle on this is intriguing, meaning it could see play in offbeat Aristocrats strategies like Wilhelt, the Rotcleaver.
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