There are a ton of cool cards hidden within Lorwyn Eclipsed. It's easy to miss a lot of exciting options, especially with the onslaught of seven sets in a year. There's hardly enough time to check out all the Rares and Mythics, much less Commons and Uncommons.

With Teenange Mutant Ninja Turtles hitting shelves soon, we're running out of time to dig into Lorwyn Eclipsed, so let's fix that by taking a look at some of the Black cards in the set I'm interested in. These cards aren't perfect by any means, but I think they're worth exploring.

Bloodline Bidding

I love Convoke! The mana cost of on Bloodline Bidding is brutal, but being able to tap a few creatures to make this happen more quickly might be worth it. The addition of Convoke is probably why the cost is sort of over inflated, but it's still worth consideration as an additional reanimation spell for Reanimator decks.

Mass reanimation decks that play cards like Living Death or Agadeem's Awakening // Agadeem, the Undercrypt are not that common. I have a lot of graveyard decks and mass reanimation is difficult to get working. Usually those spells reanimate everything (which includes your opponents' dead creatures), which isn't always great for you. Letting another graveyard deck get what they need is tough. Being able to, in a typal deck, reanimate just your creatures is huge.

Bloodline Bidding doesn't present the most flexible strategy. If you're not a typal reanimator deck, it's actually very expensive. It's niche, but a token-based Golgari Elf deck like Lathril, Blade of the Elves would love this addition. The elves she makes are Green, but they can still pay for the .

Boggart Mischief

Boggart Mischief is great for a Goblin Typal deck that runs Black. So, Grub, Storied Matriarch is a great pick. I know this is a niche use case, but I was impressed with how much this card buffs Grub decks. It's a shame that it's Black instead of Red because it would be way more versatile.

Being able to Blight 1 and create two 1/1 Black and Red Goblin creature tokens is awesome for . Goblin decks are pretty good at making tokens, so the additional value of draining 1 life from each opponent for each Goblin that dies is great for those decks. And having access to more Aristocrats pieces is great at helping Grub loop Raise Deads.

Bogslither's Embrace

Bogslither's Embrace is pretty straightforward. It sucks that it's a sorcery, but having spells that exile creatures is important since there are so many pesky creatures that need to be gone permanently. Blighting 1 isn't really much of a drawback. In an Aristocrats deck, you will almost certainly have something you're willing to Blight to cast this for cheap and exile something you want gone.

There is a little bit of a concern that Baleful Mastery might just be better. Mastery is an instant, but giving an opponent a card to cast it for is brutal. I'd rather blight than give out a card, but I'd also rather be able to cast my removal at instant speed. Embrace isn't perfect, but it's worth looking into.

Champion of the Weird

Champion of the Weird is another card that is a must include in Grub. With all the cool stuff that has come out for Rakdos Goblins, I'm hoping they make another suitable commander for them. Grub can't have all the good cards!

The reason Champion is a Grub card is because to cast it you need to behold a Goblin and exile it. Being in Black makes that tough for other Goblin decks. Paying life to Blight someone else might be very relevant. Being able to do it over and over might be a good way to kill something. Paying 1 life to give something permanently -2/-2 is great!

I worry about having to blight my own stuff, but if we have ways to remove counters from our creatures then we should be fine. It's cope, but at least sometimes, I would trade a big creature of mine to wipe another person's board.

Darkness Descends

Goodbye Scute Swarm! I love a card that just blows out token strategies. Most token strategies make boatloads of 2/2s or 1/1s, so those decks are in danger when Darkness Descends comes sniffing around. I love how it's a board wipe that doesn't destroy everything.

I worry Darkness Descends isn't strong enough to be considered an auto-include. It often kills or weakens your creatures too, so it's really not asymmetrical. Sometimes it's a dead card in your hand if one opponent is playing bigger things. It's not even an instant for the combat trick interaction.

Notably, Darkness Descends does provide a permanent debuff effect. So, it'll kill small stuff and makes big stuff smaller. It's versatile in that regard. It gives you ammunition for decks like Massacre Girl, Known Killer who wants to kill things with -1/-1 counters on them.

Dawnhand Dissident

Dawnhand Dissident is the card I'm most excited about. It's so versatile! It's only a single and does all this stuff. It blights for aristocrat strategies. It surveils, which helps out graveyard decks. It removes counters from creatures, not caring about the type of counters. And last but not least, it reanimates.

This card is going for less than $2 dollars right now and I'm very confused by that. In a reanimation strategy, you should be running this. Surveilling creatures into the graveyard to recast later by removing blighted -1/-1 counters you put on with its abilities is crazy good. It undoes the negative. It doesn't have to tap to cast the spell. You can remove any kind of counters! I'm so impressed with this card.

Conclusion

Not all these cards are versatile enough to get the spotlight, but they're definitely worth talking about for the right decks. They are most likely backups or second picks for other, stronger cards, but if you need redundancy, these cards might be worth playing. At the very least, Dawnhand Dissident is absolutely worth picking up!