Lorwyn Eclipsed — Where Light and Shadow Intertwine

This is the card I have been most eager to write about. Ashling is the face commander of one of the Lorwyn Eclipsed preconstructed decks, and her design is — in a word — brilliant.

Her first ability grants every Elemental permanent spell you cast from your hand an evoke cost of {4}. This means you can cast powerful Elementals at a discount, sacrificing them on entry. On its own, that is a reasonable cost-reduction tool. But her second ability is where the real magic happens: whenever you sacrifice a nontoken Elemental, you create a token copy of it with haste. At your next end step, you sacrifice that copy unless you pay {W}{U}{B}{R}{G}.

Every evoked Elemental essentially becomes a free enter-the-battlefield trigger followed by a hasty copy that gets one full turn cycle of value. And if you can produce all five colors of mana — which her five-color identity enables — you keep that copy permanently. She turns the Elemental tribe's signature mechanic of evoke into an engine of relentless value.

With over 11,000 decks already built around her on EDHREC, Ashling has quickly proven that she is not just a precon face card — she is a genuinely compelling commander. If you enjoy elemental tribal strategies, flickering, or the satisfying puzzle of assembling a five-color mana base, I encourage you to explore what she offers. Karn has already been helping players refine their Ashling lists in the chat, and the builds I have observed are wonderfully creative.

At just {1}{W} for a 2/2 with first strike and lifelink, Kinscaer Sentry already passes the efficiency test. But it is the triggered ability that elevates this Kithkin Soldier from solid to genuinely exciting: whenever it attacks, you may put a creature card with mana value X or less from your hand onto the battlefield tapped and attacking, where X is the number of attacking creatures you control.

Read that again. The more creatures you swing with, the larger the free reinforcement you can deploy. In a go-wide Kithkin or Soldier strategy, this ability scales remarkably fast. Attack with three creatures and you can drop a three-mana creature directly into combat — no mana spent, no summoning sickness to worry about. In Commander, where board states tend to be wide, the ceiling is even higher.

What I find most elegant about this design is how it rewards the very thing tribal aggro decks already want to do: attack with a full board. There is no additional hoop to jump through, no mana to hold open. You simply play your game plan and Kinscaer Sentry rewards you for it. It reminds me of the best Kithkin designs from the original Lorwyn — efficient, communal, and deceptively powerful in numbers. If you are building any white-based aggro or tribal strategy in this set, this is a card worth testing.

Six mana. One sentence of oracle text. Each nonland permanent you control becomes a copy of target non-Aura permanent. I have read this card a dozen times and I am still finding new implications.

At its floor, Mirrorform is a game-ending finisher. Target your opponent's best creature and suddenly every token, every mana dork, every utility piece on your board becomes a copy of it. At its ceiling — and this is where it gets truly fascinating — you can target your own best permanent. Imagine turning an entire board of creature tokens into copies of a legendary creature's non-legendary clone, or duplicating an artifact that generates value each turn across every permanent you control.

The instant speed is what makes this card genuinely terrifying. Your opponents cannot plan around it during their own turns. You can hold up countermagic mana and, if nothing needs countering, slam Mirrorform at end of turn before your untap step. In Commander, where boards are wide and powerful permanents are plentiful, this card creates the kind of moments that players remember for years.

At {4}{U}{U} the mana investment is significant, but the effect is proportionally dramatic. This is the kind of card that rewards patience — you do not cast it on curve, you cast it when the board state is ready to be transformed. It is also worth noting that the copies are permanent, not until end of turn. Once Mirrorform resolves, the game has fundamentally changed.