The Chronicle of Victory I pulled out of a Collector Booster on release weekend has been quietly losing about a dollar a month. It was flirting with $30 the first few days after Lorwyn Eclipsed hit shelves on January 23. As of this morning it’s $19.05 on Scryfall. Still the most expensive card in the set, still the kithkin-flavored mythic everyone at my LGS points at when the conversation turns to “did anyone actually open anything,” and still the one I’m glad I didn’t trade away in February when someone offered me a tin of Innistrad bulk for it.
That slow bleed is the story of Lorwyn Eclipsed’s first three months, and it’s worth pulling apart if you’ve still got singles from the set sitting in a “sort later” pile.
The top tier held, sort of
Current top five as of today:
- Chronicle of Victory: $19.05 (foil $26.78)
- Hexing Squelcher: $17.45 (foil $18.92)
- Bitterbloom Bearer: $14.63 (foil $16.91)
- Bloom Tender: $12.21 (foil $16.26)
- Steam Vents: $10.30 (foil $10.47)
None of those are set-defining numbers. Compare it to a Modern Horizons release, where the top cards are pushing $50-80 at the three-month mark. Lorwyn Eclipsed peaked lower and has mostly drifted, which tracks with what it is: a Standard-legal typal set without an Arena-shaking chase rare. There’s no Orcish Bowmasters in this box. There’s no The One Ring.
Hexing Squelcher beating most of the mythics at rare is the most interesting entry. Two-mana goblin, “spells you control can’t be countered,” ward-pay-2 on the whole team. That’s the kind of text box that quietly becomes a control-mirror hate card in Standard or Pioneer. I’ve seen it in three different Pioneer lists on mtgtop8 this month, which tells me the price has room to move if a format breaks the right way. Or it doesn’t, and it settles at $8 by June. I’m not great at guessing which of those is more likely.
The Bloom Tender situation
Bloom Tender is a card I’ve watched for a long time, mostly because I keep wanting to slot it into a five-color Commander brew and then deciding my manabase is fine as it is. It was $25+ on Eventide paper for years. Double Masters 2022 brought it down to around $15. Special Guests dropped it to $12 last November. Lorwyn Eclipsed has it at $12.21 and the needle basically hasn’t moved.
What that tells me is the card’s hit a floor. Another reprint isn’t going to crater it further — there’s a durable Commander base propping up the price in the low teens pretty much no matter what. If you’ve been eyeing a copy for the 99, now is as good a time as you’re going to get.
The shockland reprints
Lorwyn Eclipsed reprinted five shocklands — Steam Vents, Blood Crypt, Overgrown Tomb, Temple Garden, Hallowed Fountain — in a new reversible art frame. Prices are settling in the $7-10 range, which is roughly where shocklands always land a few months after a reprint.
If you’re sitting on old Guildpact or Return to Ravnica shocklands because you remember them being $20 cards, update the mental model. The $20 era is over, probably permanently, and you’ll have a hard time moving old copies for more than the Lorwyn Eclipsed versions once buylists catch up. Flip side: the reversible frame is genuinely gorgeous and carries a small novelty premium on TCGplayer that’s been stable since release. If I were assembling a Commander manabase right now I’d just buy the ECL copies.
I’ll caveat this, because I keep going back and forth. Part of me thinks the reversible frame is a fad and the Return to Ravnica frames will reassert themselves as the “classic” version over the next few years. Part of me thinks I’m telling myself that because I have a pile of RTR shocks in a binder and don’t want to face the truth about what they’re worth now. Genuinely unsure which part is right.
Commons and uncommons worth flagging
Most of the set’s commons and uncommons are at 30-60 cents, which is bulk for all practical purposes. But scanning the top of the commons list surfaced a few interesting entries:
- Chomping Changeling (uncommon): $0.64
- Gathering Stone (uncommon): $0.62
- Spell Snare (uncommon reprint): $0.32
Spell Snare is the one I want to flag. It’s been a Modern staple for most of its life, in the $2-4 range depending on printing. The Lorwyn Eclipsed reprint at uncommon rarity dropped it to $0.32 and it’s stuck there. If you’re building Modern and have been putting off a playset, this is the moment. I grabbed four copies for $1.28 shipped from a TCGplayer seller last week and felt vaguely like I was getting away with something.
What tanked
The misses in a set tell you as much as the hits. A few cards that were getting hyped in the preview season have quietly collapsed:
- Mirrorform (mythic), $2.88. Was $10+ on preorder thanks to some jank Eldrazi combo someone posted on Reddit.
- Morningtide’s Light (mythic), $2.15. Was being pushed as a kithkin commander payoff at around $8.
- Soul Immolation (mythic), $2.56. Spiked briefly on Pioneer speculation that never materialized.
I don’t love saying “I told you so” because I bought into the Mirrorform hype too, but if you’re reading this and also got caught holding, you’re not alone.
The Commander precons are a separate story. I grabbed one of them in February expecting the face commander to spike in EDHREC inclusion. It didn’t. The deck’s fine, the cards are fun, the product did not pay for itself as a financial move. That’s three precons in a row I’ve made that mistake on, but I keep doing it because apparently I don’t learn.
What I’d actually do with a pile of Lorwyn Eclipsed cards right now
Three things, not a list but a rough order.
Scan the Collector Booster stuff first. The value lives in mythics and shocklands, and even if most of them are $7-10 cards, that adds up quickly when you forget about a dozen of them. I ran my Lorwyn Eclipsed pulls through Eldwyn in about 25 minutes and now I can watch the total creep down week-over-week, which is weirdly motivating for finally cutting losses on stuff like that Mirrorform.
Don’t sit on the chase mythics hoping for a rebound. Chronicle of Victory at $19 is probably closer to its ceiling than its floor for this year. Commander demand will keep it above bulk mythic territory, but it’s not becoming a $40 card barring a Standard archetype emerging. If you need the cash or the trade credit, take it.
And stop pre-ordering Commander precons as a financial play. Or at least I’m going to stop. Probably. Maybe.
So yeah. Three months in. The set’s fine. Spell Snare at thirty cents still feels like free money to me. The shocklands are going to clutter up Commander manabases for the next decade, which I’m personally thrilled about because I need Temple Gardens anyway.
If you’re trying to figure out which cards from Secrets of Strixhaven will hold value after its release this weekend, I wrote a product guide last week covering the box-level decisions. And if you’re triaging your collection because of rotation pressure more than post-release analysis, the 2027 rotation piece is probably more useful than watching Chronicle of Victory bleed out a dollar a month.
Still not trading mine.