Emptiness – Avatar
Date Reviewed: October 24, 2025
Ratings:
Constructed: 4
Casual: 4.5
Limited: 4.25
Multiplayer: 3.5
Commander [EDH]: 4
Ratings are based on a 1 to 5 scale. 1 is bad. 3 is average. 5 is great.
Reviews Below:
I think of a lot of things when it comes to the Lorwyn block. Many of them don’t have to do with the gameplay; in fact, I would argue that Lorwyn‘s greatest strengths are related to its creative and flavor elements, considering that Faeries, Five-Color Control, and Reveillark ruined some people’s experience with Standard. But the art and flavor stand out because they show an unusually wide range of things from the plane. At one end, you have everyday life in pastoral villages (or fortified camps, in Shadowmoor); at the other, you have incomprehensible alien gods. The minor ones were represented by the evoke elementals like Mulldrifter, and the major ones by mind-blowing monstrosities like Horde of Notions and Shadowmoor‘s Spirit Avatars.
Lorwyn Eclipsed seems to be following in that tradition, but its gods have evolved somewhat. Emptiness definitely draws on both the evoke elementals and the Spirit Avatars, with its focus on hybrid mana and its strong invitation to use its alternate cost. With the older cards like Mulldrifter, I’ve often found that there are advantages to getting the trigger from their evoke cost as opposed to a sorcery dedicated to that effect. Some of this has to do with the fact that you’re also putting a creature in the graveyard, but also with the fact that the older ones still worked if you later reanimated them. That loophole’s been closed with Emptiness, but overall it’s not much less strong (if at all). Because it’s easy to misread, like I did the first time I saw it, and get distracted by the fact that its evoke cost lines up so well with the stipulations in the rest of its rules text. You can forget that you can also cast it for its high mana cost, and spend one or both of the specified costs in the process. And if you remember to do this, you’ll get an advantage that really shines out, and probably will even in this high-octane era of Magic. Any of this card’s modes can turn a game around and they’re all hard to stop – I can’t be sure what people are going to do until I see the rest of the set, but I am pretty sure this is going to be a card to beat.
Constructed: 4
Casual: 4.5
Limited: 4
Multiplayer: 4
Commander [EDH]: 4
I linked to Overbeing of Myth above, whose flavor text comes from the same source as all of Shadowmoor and Eventide‘s Spirit Avatars: a poem called “The Seer’s Parables”. The complete text of the poem actually exists, and Wizards of the Coast once published it in a flavor article from 2008. You can still read it via the Internet Archive (hopefully that’ll remain the case). Revisiting it now, I feel that the similarities to Völuspá and the rest of the Eddas stand out even more – from its sweeping view across all of time and the parallels in the topics discussed and the seeress’ attitude, to its question-and-answer structure based on Gylfaginning. But this helps shore up the vastness end of Lorwyn‘s flavor continuum, and Rei Nakazawa’s attempt at a “series of gigantic pictures”, as Henry Bellows described Völuspá, is surely fitting for a block that helped pave the way not just for Theros and Throne of Eldraine but also Bloomburrow.
This set is several months off, so this is based off of the information we have thus far. These scores might not be as accurate, especially for Limited.
The long-awaited return to Lorwyn is coming, and Emptiness is an interesting take on old mechanics that foretells interesting things ahead. It functionally has three modes: a cheap reanimation spell for double white, removal/weakening for double black, or both stapled to a decent body at six mana. That sort of value is always scary to see in action, and it’s not impossible to make the full value creature a functional three-for-one in the process. But even if you need to cast this early, two mana is a decent price for each of these effects, so long as you pay the double-colored cost associated with it.
As I often say, modality and flexibility are big, and this scores very well on that axis. I’d be surprised if Emptiness wasn’t a solid part of the upcoming Standard it will be joining, because it has plenty of flexibility and can even just go in a mono-colored deck (or deck excluding one of its colors) if you have reason for that one particular effect stapled to a decent body.
Constructed: 4
Casual: 4.5
Limited: 4.5 (removal, reanimation, and a decent body are all quite scary)
Multiplayer: 3
Commander [EDH]: 4
Thijs
Coming Soon
Constructed:
Casual:
Limited:
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Commander [EDH]:
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