MTG Lorwyn Eclipsed prerelease guide: Why tribes can be a trap in drafts

How many MTG tribes are too many?

Magic: The Gathering’s newest set, Lorwyn Eclipsed, is built around tribal strategies. In MTG, “tribes” are cards with the same creature type, and Lorwyn Eclipsed has eight of them: merfolk, kithkins, elementals, fairies, treefolk, giants, elves, and goblins. Asking a single 273-card set to support eight possible tribes in Limited — plus an extra Vivid deck that rewards having permanents of many colors — is a lot, and unfortunately, Lorwyn Eclipsed shows the consequences of such restrictions.

In my experience playing Lorwyn Eclipsed’s early access events on MTG Arena, I discovered that building a good Sealed deck is hard work. (A Sealed deck is made using the cards contained in six closed packs plus any basic lands you want.) With so many tribes, the rares and mythics you open often don’t synergize well with each other. The same goes for the rest of your pool: You may open a bunch of great white cards for a merfolk deck, but if the rest of your pool doesn’t allow you to build that specific deck, then you have essentially lost a color. However, it didn’t have to be this way.

MTG’s previous set, Avatar: The Last Airbender, featured a beloved gimmick for its prerelease events: a special “Character Booster” containing seeded cards themed around a character from Team Avatar, and more importantly, around a color. We’ve seen this implemented for many sets in the past, from Tarkir: Dragonstorm all the way back to Guilds of Ravnica. It’s an efficient way to make sure that sets built around specific color or tribal combinations still function well in Sealed, at least for prerelease events.

Lorwyn Eclipsed could have featured special kits with a seeded booster that helped you build your tribal deck of choice. It made sense, considering this is such a strong focus for the set. The lack of seeded boosters isn’t the only issue, however. Lorwyn Eclipsed simply has too much going on. In its official presentation, the set only has five tribal archetypes for Limited: merfolk, kithkins, elementals, goblins, and elves. However, there are also five more archetypes “hidden” in the set, which are harder to draft or build. Overall, all 10 color pairs are represented, but support for each is so diluted that it’s harder than usual to build a functional deck.

On top of the five main tribes, the designers decided to add treefolk, fairies, and giants. These were all present in the original Lorwyn-Shadowmoor block, which, however, included four small sets in total, giving each tribe enough room. Nowadays, Wizards of the Coast has moved away from blocks, but the designers still wanted to include all the tribes in the single Lorwyn Eclipsed set, likely to satisfy nostalgic fans and players of Commander (where tribal decks are always popular).

You likely won’t be able to build a giant or treefolk deck in Lorwyn Eclipsed, but those cards are still there, taking up important design space. For Sealed, where you don’t have control over what cards you get, this will result in deckbuilding being more difficult compared to previous sets.

I opened a total of four Sealed pools, and almost every time, I gravitated towards Vivid piles that allowed me to play as many of my good cards as possible. One time I was able to build a good elementals deck, and another I had a mediocre merfolk deck. Still, I often had the impression that I was playing subpar cards to force a strategy, because I had no other option.

However, once you are able to find some good synergies, then the power level spikes up. I’ve seen players doing some pretty nasty things with the counters from the Blight mechanic, for example, but you need to study your pool accurately to find the potential combos and how to enable them. It’s not as easy as it was for Avatar, with its abundant fixing and easily splashable bombs.

Draft is obviously a bit different. You can find the open tribal lane and get rewarded, but it’s not always easy. In the example below, I tried first-picking a tribal signpost, as an experiment. As you can see, the end result was underwhelming, because I wasn’t passed many powerful cards for my archetype.

When I remained open (meaning I didn't commit to a specific strategy immediately), instead, I ended up with a pretty decent multicolor deck, with good Vivid payoffs and some bombs.

In conclusion, I think that Lorwyn Eclipsed suffers from design bloating. They had to cram all the tribes into a single set, plus the duality theme of the Lorwyn-Shadowmoor dynamic, and some multiversal guests on top. According to Mark Rosewater’s blog, due to the poor sales of the original Lorwyn, the only way this return to the plane could be greenlit was by making it a single set. The result, however, doesn’t necessarily work in favor of a good Limited experience.

If you’re heading to Lorwyn Eclipsed prereleases this weekend, make sure to take enough time to study your card pool. Look for the powerful synergies, which may lie outside of the tribal mechanics. Green-based multicolor decks are a good, safe choice, especially if you open some of the strong Vivid payoffs, such as Explosive Prodigy, Prismabasher, Shinestriker, or if you’re truly blessed, Aurora Awakener. In a Draft, snatch those Great Forest Druid and Changeling Wayfinder when you see them!

If you want a more thorough guide to Lorwyn Eclipsed Limited, you can find one here. Good luck with your pools!