Every plane has something they're especially well known for. Innistrad has monsters and double-faced cards, Avishkar (formerly Kaladesh) has artifacts and vehicles, Tarkir has dragons galore. In the case of Lorwyn and Shadowmoor, the duality of the plane means there are a myriad of aspects that it's best known for. Typal strategies are perhaps the number one element, but it goes far deeper than that. You get many unusual creature types, -1/-1 counters, color matters, and untapping things - among others.

One of the coolest elements of the plane, though, is, well, just that: the elementals! These come in two forms on the plane. The first are the Flamekin, known as Cinders on old Shadowmoor and Rimekin on new Shadowmoor. These are humanoid beings who burst with dazzling flames by day or eerie ice by night. Prior to gaining ice in Shadowmoor, they were represented as weak and decayed forms, their bright flames nearly extinguished.

The other kind of elements are those of abstract concepts made real. This can include simple creatures like Mulldrifter, Shriekmaw, and Ingot Chewer. Things get even more outrageous when you see the likes of Vigor, Hostility, Purity, Guile, and Dread. It's a hodgepodge of baffling designs and ethereal appearances, because that's simply how they're meant to appear: incomprehensible in many senses of the word.

This would continue on over the years, chiefly when Modern Horizons 2 came out. With this, we got the now infamous cycle of Solitude, Subtlety, Grief, Fury, and Endurance. Each one of these has made a monumental impact in Modern and Legacy, with some of them being so strong that they ended up being banned.

This style of mighty conceptual elementals continues with various iterations in the new Lorwyn Eclipsed. Five new evoke elementals make up a powerful cycle of mythic rares once more, though they are joined by other elementals lacking in evoke. For example, Sunderfolk has seen some play alongside these evoke creatures to powerful effect in Standard ever so shortly after the set's release!

All of these concepts - including those of the Flamekin/Rimekin - are further explored in one of the set's two Commander decks: Dance of the Elements.

Ashling, a Flamekin, was - at least visually - a major central figure in the original Lorwyn and Shadowmoor sets/blocks. Imbued with the power of a mighty and ancient elemental force, she continues to play a major role in the modern day plane. She remains one of the most iconic characters for many - myself included - and was an obvious central piece to this deck. Not only does she serve this role well, but you also get the concept-based elementals in this list thanks the incomprehensible Mass of Mysteries.

Thanks to this, we're treated to an all-new deck bringing with it all manner of new and powerful elementals. Additionally, we've got a ton of amazing reprints, making for a sweet deck for anyone to pick up and play. Ashling herself seems so strong, in fact, that many players have already deemed her to be a "kill on sight" commander!

The real question is, though: does this deck have the juice to back it up? In my opinion: yes! Let's take a peek at the list then dive into it a bit.

Dance of the Elements Precon | Commander

• Commander (1)
• 1 Ashling, the Limitless

• Creatures (35)
• 1 Avenger of Zendikar
• 1 Bane of Progress
• 1 Belonging
• 1 Cavalier of Thorns
• 1 Eclipsed Flamekin
• 1 Endurance
• 1 Faeburrow Elder
• 1 Flamebraider
• 1 Foundation Breaker
• 1 Fury
• 1 Greenwarden of Murasa
• 1 Horde of Notions
• 1 Impulsivity
• 1 Incandescent Soulstoke
• 1 Ingot Chewer
• 1 Jegantha, the Wellspring
• 1 Jubilation
• 1 Lamentation
• 1 Maelstrom Wanderer
• 1 Mass of Mysteries
• 1 Muldrotha, the Gravetide
• 1 Mulldrifter
• 1 Omnath, Locus of Rage
• 1 Omnath, Locus of the Roil
• 1 Realmwalker
• 1 Risen Reef
• 1 Selvala, Heart of the Wilds
• 1 Shimmercreep
• 1 Shriekmaw
• 1 Slithermuse
• 1 Smokebraider
• 1 Subterfuge
• 1 Titan of Industry
• 1 Vernal Sovereign
• 1 Yarok, the Desecrated

• Instants (5)
• 1 Crib Swap
• 1 Kindred Summons
• 1 Path to Exile
• 1 Reality Shift
• 1 Return of the Wildspeaker

• Sorceries (7)
• 1 Blasphemous Act
• 1 Cultivate
• 1 Distant Melody
• 1 Elemental Spectacle
• 1 Haunting Voyage
• 1 Kodama's Reach
• 1 Shatter the Sky

• Enchantments (7)
• 1 Abundant Growth
• 1 Cream of the Crop
• 1 Descendants' Fury[/card]
• 1 Fertile Ground
• 1 Garruk's Uprising
• 1 Hoofprints of the Stag
• 1 Springleaf Parade

• Artifacts (5)
• 1 Arcane Signet
• 1 Chromatic Lantern
• 1 Fellwar Stone
• 1 Sol Ring
• 1 Timeless Lotus

• Lands (40)
• 2 Island
• 2 Mountain
• 2 Plains
• 2 Swamp
• 8 Forest
• 1 Abundant Countryside
• 1 Ancient Ziggurat
• 1 Command Tower
• 1 Exotic Orchard
• 1 Flamekin Village
• 1 Frontier Bivouac
• 1 Jungle Shrine
• 1 Opal Palace
• 1 Opulent Palace
• 1 Path of Ancestry
• 1 Primal Beyond
• 1 Raging Ravine
• 1 Rain-Slicked Copse
• 1 Sandsteppe Citadel
• 1 Savage Lands
• 1 Seaside Citadel
• 1 Secluded Courtyard
• 1 Sodden Verdure
• 1 Thriving Bluff
• 1 Thriving Grove
• 1 Thriving Heath
• 1 Thriving Isle
• 1 Thriving Moor
• 1 Unclaimed Territory

Buy This Deck Export text

There are tons of excellent elementals in the deck! Seeing powerful classics like Avenger of Zendikar, Mulldrifter, and Risen Reef is always going to be awesome. Lots of really cool and somewhat unexpected cards made a solid showing as well! I'm not sure I'd have ever expected to see cards like Endurance, Fury, or Jegantha, the Wellspring in a deck like this, but here we are! It's a who's who of sweet elementals for players to utilize to the fullest.

Despite this strong showing, the first thing many people will naturally want to look into expanding on is the elementals themselves. Both Ashling, the Limitless and Mass of Mysteries care about the creature type and allow you to do powerful things with those creatures. As a result, it makes sense that you'd want to find the best options to take full advantage of either commander.

Typically I'd deep dive into the wide swath of options available to you as a player, but as it happens, I've already done this in no small part!

In late 2025, I had the pleasure of writing a PreDH piece on Horde of Notions. That powerful elemental legend - which sees a reprint in this very deck - provided a strong reason to make good use of the elemental creature type. Not only did I include tons of powerful elementals in that deck, but I also explored the cards I didn't include as well!

I was shocked at just how deep the card pool was. It made it surprisingly difficult to narrow a list down to just 100 cards. Though I did it successfully, it clearly left a lot on the cutting room floor with plenty of room for personalization. As such, there's a plethora of options to pull from and a lot that's already been said that's best not repeated. Instead, go check out that piece and find some great choices.

All that having been said, PreDH is a time capsule format ending in mid-2011 with the release of New Phyrexia. We're now in 2026, which means we have 15 years of additional elementals having been added to the card pool. Especially when you take WotC's fairly intense release schedule nowadays, there's sure to be several great options not included in the precon or in the PreDH age. So then, what are some of the good elementals to add in?

Well, why not look to the brand new Lorwyn Eclipsed first and foremost? There are plenty of awesome new elementals. Yes, the obvious ones should be the mythic evoke creatures, as some of them are great for a format like Commander. Vibrance in particular stands out among the rest, providing you with a way to fix your mana effectively and/or take out an annoying threat. Wistfulness is just about as useful, provided you have the money to get your hands on a copy.

You don't have to go hard and heavy with your inclusions, though! Plenty of other options at lower rarities will get the job done just fine. For example, Twinflame Travelers feels like a headscratcher as it's an easy inclusion that doubles up on the intensity of the elementals you cast. Similarly, Tanufel Rimespeaker can turn into a real card advantage engine when most of your elementals cost more than four mana. Evoke creatures are especially good here, as their mana values stay high even when you evoke them cheaply, providing a very effective way to get even more band for your buck.

Another great place to look is Bloomburrow. Each of the powerful Calamity Beast creatures is an elemental. Many of these provide incredible effects that can take over a game in quick succession. As a result, they provide a great series of options by which you can pull from. You probably don't want to play a copy of Sunspine Lynx if you're planning on seriously upgrading your mana base, but a copy of Rottenmouth Viper or Beza, the Bounding Spring goes a long way.

Overall, there are over 350 elementals once you get past the PreDH era. As such, it'd be silly to go all the way through them, and the above examples are simply two sets where you can find plenty of good elementals to include here. Here's a couple that stood out to me as I was going through the list:

• Animar, Soul of Elements - This provides stellar cost reduction and is hard to take out effectively with spot removal. This one has jumped quite a bit in price thanks to the printing of this deck, however.
• Bramble Familiar - Hey, who doesn't love an adorable little mana dork? I sure do, but more importantly I love when they also come with a big extra bonus as well! Bramble Familiar's Adventure side allows you to play some big stuff from your deck, provided you have the mana to do so. Not a bad deal overall!
• Cavalier of Night - Really this is a stand-in for the whole Cavalier cycle. Only Cavalier of Thorns got a reprint in this deck, perhaps notable because it's the only one of the cycle that continues to see major tournament play in Pioneer. However, all of them do powerful things and are quite good in games of Commander everywhere.
• Magmatic Force - The whole Force cycle (inspired by Verdant Force) are big, powerful creatures, some more so than others. Magmatic Force has the benefit of casting a free Lightning Bolt every single turn, allowing you to keep opposing forces in check with a single powerful threat.
• Voice of Resurgence - This one is an absolute classic of Constructed play, despite coming from an infamously bad set. It's a great way to deter opponents from doing things on other players' turns and rewards you heavily if they do so.
• Whisperwood Elemental - I'm almost a bit baffled that this card didn't make it into the deck. It's outstanding board wipe insurance that's great in Commander and even has a tournament history from back in the day. I imagine they didn't have the space/budget to include the manifest token, but it's not very difficult for you to represent and is a great inclusion that will cost you little more than a few pennies.

Finally, I wanted to touch on the big elephant in the room with this list: the mana base.

Five-color mana bases often are questionable at best and downright suck at worst. Preconstructed Commander decks are usually the worst about this. The Commander 2017 deck helmed by The Ur-Dragon was a fairly infamous instance of this, as it included full cycles of lands rather than balancing them more closely to the color representations of the deck overall.

With this deck, I feel like that's actually one of its strengths. It does, in fact, care about the balance of color in its mana base. It's not hard to see that many of the dual lands and tri-lands all lean prominently on Green as a key color. This is due to the fact that five-color decks often rely on Green to provide a means by which to fix their mana. Since you need early access to Green mana to cast those fixing/ramp spells, it makes sense that you'd have a higher number of these lands.

There's also the modern day innovation of the Thriving lands. These lands actually aren't that great and can probably be upgraded pretty easily, but they're excellent when it comes to preconstructed decks due to their flexibility. If you really need that Green mana, any one of these will get you there. If you already have plenty of Green mana at your disposal, though, you can make the second color whatever you need most at the moment. That's excellent in a list like this, and a marked step up from the Lorwyn Vivid lands that stopped producing any color just a few turns after being played.

If you do seek to improve this deck's mana base further, I'd try to make sure that you're maintaining this Green focus. This gives you the best access to your ramp spells like Cultivate, Kodama's Reach, Abundant Growth, Fertile Ground, and so on. You can do this by adding in the Green-based shock lands (Breeding Pool, Overgrown Tomb, Stomping Ground, and Temple Garden). With shocks being at their cheapest ever, this is the best time to get in on them for an upgraded list.

That said, though, the deck feels rather light on ramp overall. It's a top-heavy deck and while that can be a lot of fun to play at a casual level, you really want to ramp into those bigger cards. You could go a long way by adding in a few more ramp spells or just some good old fashioned mana dorks. Birds of Paradise would be an excellent inclusion, for example, but something like Farseek would be perfect to grab you a non-Green land or a dual land with Forest typing.

All of this is to say this deck rules. It does have some minor flaws along the way, but they're easily fixable. Best yet, the wide range of elementals throughout Magic's long and storied history gives you no shortage of awesome cards to pull from in improving this deck. It's a great way to customize a cool list and make it entirely your own. If that isn't an excellent way to enjoy your next Commander night, I don't know what is!

Get out there and play some Lorwyn Eclipsed!

Paige Smith

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