Magic’s overpowered new Commander gets a nerf — before it’s even out

Barely 24 hours after Magic: The Gathering‘s newest Commander decks were revealed as part of the upcoming Lorwyn Eclipsed set, one extremely powerful card is already getting a slight downgrade. Ashling the Flamekin has been a popular character since the days of the original Lorwyn-Shadowmoor block, so it makes sense she’d headline one of the new set’s two Commander decks. Dance of the Elements is a five-color preconstructed deck that’s all about casting elementals for cheaper and capitalizing on their Enter the Battlefield (ETB) triggers. Ashling, the Limitless has two abilities that interact exclusively with her fellow elementals — just a little too much.

Her first ability gives all elemental spells you cast from your hand evoke 4, meaning you can pay four colorless mana to cast an elemental, and then it’s sacrificed after it hits the board. Then, whenever you sacrifice a nontoken elemental, you can create a copy of it with haste. You then sacrifice that copy at the end of the turn unless you pay one of each mana, for a total of five. The strategy here is to double up on the ETB and sacrifice bonuses of your other elemental creatures, but as some Magic players quickly noticed, Ashling is actually even more powerful than that — at least the way the card is currently phrased.

The issue is that the kindred mechanic has returned in Lorwyn Eclipsed, giving creature types to certain noncreature cards. In other words, the set includes non-creature spells that are technically still elementals. That makes it theoretically possible to cast a kindred instant that’s also an elemental with Ashling’s evoke. But what exactly would happen? Instants don’t technically “enter” the battlefield, so they can’t be sacrificed. Therefore, Ashling’s second ability wouldn’t trigger. What gets tricky is that official rules for evoke do specify that the card in question has to be a permanent, essentially implying that it has to be a creature. But I’m sure at plenty of casual tables, players might think you’d be able to cast an instant with kindred and elemental on it and then copy that spell, which would theoretically lead to some pretty devastating combos.

Replying to a post on Bluesky asking about this specific interaction, Wizards of the Coast principal editor Matt Tabak confirmed that “Ashling is getting an update to its wording to function only with Elemental permanent spells.” So before the set’s even been released, the face card for a preconstructed Commander deck is getting errata (official changes to text on cards in Magic-speak).

As a mechanic, evoke has always been tied specifically to permanents because it only meaningfully resolves once that permanent lands on the battlefield and is sacrificed at the end of the turn. That’s been the case with every evoke card since Lorwyn first introduced the mechanic in 2007. This new situation highlights one of the reasons why Wizards of the Coast’s Research & Design team stopped using kindred (formerly called tribal) altogether. 2010’s Rise of the Eldrazi was the last standard-legal set to feature the mechanic — until now. When asked about kindred on his blog in the past, Magic head designer Mark Rosewater called it “horribly inconsistent” and “problematic everywhere” because it results in a “lot of extra words with very little use.” Turns out he was right.