Lorwyn had quite the fall in 2007, only to rise in the years afterwards.
Back in 2007, Lorwyn was a bit of a gamble. Set in a plane based on Welsh/British/Irish mythology, it certainly had the fantasy pedigree that players were accustomed to in Magic: The Gathering expansions. That said, it didn't go off without a hitch.
First off, during that time, expansions came out in blocks, meaning that you would be playing in the plane for a good part of a year. Besides the one-off Coldsnap expansion a year prior, the three-expansion block system had been in place since 1996.
Lorwyn upset that.
Thanks to the mechanics and story of it, where a planar event switches everything around, there were a pair of two-set blocks: Lorwyn and Morningtide, and then Shadowmoor and Eventide. Needless to say, players were a bit confused by this new setup.
And then there were the characters and creatures. No humans were there. Instead, the set's main creature types included elves, kithkin, flamekin, giants, merfolk, goblins, and faeries.
When it came out, Lorwyn was also seen as underpowered, with it being compared to the likes of Homelands and Mercadian Masques. While parts of it were praised, such as the tribal system and the art that is still hailed as some of the best ever put into the game, other parts of it weren't so lauded. Add in the fact that kithkin creatures made some players uncomfortable and that the great recession started just as the set came out and you have an expansion that was incidentally set up to not do so well.
How not well?
Let Mark Rosewater explain:
"Lorwyn is the worst-selling large set (in contrast to its time) in the history of the game. Returning there is not just doing 100% what we did last time. That doesn’t mean 0% either. Think of Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty. It will use modern design technologies, but still have nostalgia for what people loved about the world."
For several years, Lorwyn held that reputation - the big set that tried a lot of new things, went human-less and then did terribly. For years, Lorwyn was that expansion players talked about as the baseline for not doing so well.
But then, around the mid 2010's, something curious happened. People began liking it.
While the unique art had always kept it as being seen as having some quality to it, it began being revisited by players, with a new appreciation being found for it. What was a commercial failure was now something of a cult classic/sleeper hit.
And some of it's weaknesses began to get eroded. The block system was largely undone following Ixalan and Wizards of the Coast showed how one-off planes could succeed. Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty proved that you could return to a formerly unpopular plane as long as you changed it up. The sorta cutesy nature of the plane pre-Shadowmoor and the curse of having no humans in the expansion was undone by Bloomburrow, which utilized both and became one of the best selling expansions in years in 2024.
With Lorwyn's reputation now being rehabbed in recent years, it is now in a unique place. While other underpowered sets like Homelands you can still buy boosters at such a low price, the Lorwyn sets are getting hard to get. Lorwyn and Shadowmoor block boosters now go for more than most classic Magic expansion boosters and is by far one the most valuable traditional booster packs from the past 20 years or so.
Wizards noticed too. In 2026, Magic is returning to Lorwyn for the first time in 19 years, with it learning from Kamigawa and Bloomburrow on how to deal with changing it yet keeping favorite parts of it for the original and dealing positively by having no human characters. The art style may also be returning to the more water color/colored pencil vibe of the original.
Lorwyn may not have been quick out of the gate, but it had perhaps some of the most endearing longetivity seen of any plane.
