MTG’s Run Away Together gets even weirder in Lorwyn Eclipsed reprint

At some point in Eldraine’s history, there lived a human named Malacan who was exiled from the court of Vantress. We don’t know precisely why, but we do know that Malacan was a bit of a romantic, saying, “Virtue is virtue, whatever the heart that nurtures it.” This quote appears as flavor text on a particular Magic: The Gathering card, a blue instant called Run Away Together that was first printed in 2019’s Throne of Eldraine. None of this is particularly out of the ordinary, but the card art is odd, depicting a human walking hand-in-hand with what looks like a monstrous scarecrow. They’re wearing blue robes typical of Vantress humans and look positively gleeful.

Did Malacan fall in love with a construct created by a witch? And that’s why they were exiled? We’ll probably never know the truth, but the first printing of Run Away Together as part of Throne of Eldraine marked the first time that Wizards of the Coast used the card to present oddball romantic pairings in the game. And the latest comes as part of the Lorwyn Eclipsed set, due out later this month.

For one colorless and one blue mana, Run Away Together is an instant that has the player choose two target creatures controlled by different players, and those creatures are returned to their owners’ hands. It’s a pretty simple bounce removal spell that can clear a few creatures off the board. And it’s best in four-player Commander, where you can target two opposing players rather than yourself and your opponent. Whatever cards get removed can still be played on subsequent turns, but for two mana, it’s a cheap way to control the flow of the game, which is so typical of blue spells.

Run Away Together has seen several reprintings in the years since. As part of 2022’s Commander Legends: Battle for Baldur's Gate, Wizards delivered another version that leaned even more sinister, even macabre. In a field of flowers with a gazebo in the background, there stands a Mind Flayer with the purple tendrils of its hands wrapped around the torso and head of what looks like a gith or hobgoblin. Both figures appear to be gazing lovingly at each other, especially the figure on the right, who appears to be smiling with his hands outstretched in a welcoming gesture. It might even be cute — if you forget about the fact that Mind Flayers are powerful psychics that eat brains for food. “True love means always knowing what’s on the other’s mind,” the flavor text reads. Well, a Mind Flayer would certainly be good at that.

Because this is from the Baldur's Gate set, however, the assumption that most people have is that we're looking at Omeluum the friendly Mind Flayer trader featured in Baldur's Gate 3 and his dear companion Blurg. The figure is almost certainly a generic gith, however, and Blurg is a hobgoblin — he's also quite red, by the way. Gith and hobgoblins do look similar enough that it hasn't stopped the fandom from using this card to form headcanon around the implied romance between these two. In BG3, they're depicted as close friends and companions who care deeply for one another, enough so that it fueled the shipping theories even before this version of Run Away Together was printed.

The next Run Away Together reprint came with 2024’s Bloomburrow, in what’s easily the most charming of them all: an otter and a frog hold hands aboard a tiny wooden sailboat, yet again staring adoringly at one another. “Nobody bothered to look for Libo and Pulla, because everyone knew they didn’t want to be found,” it reads. Whereas the previous two iterations come across as a bit frightening due to their particular pairings, there’s nothing off-kilter here. Though it’s funny to think of an otter and a frog having some sort of romantic relationship.

Lorwyn Eclipsed delivers yet another version of Run Away Together that leans heavily on the romance, depicting a Shadowmoor elf and a faerie. “You don’t need to steal my dreams, my love,” it reads. “They are already yours.” The speaker here is clearly the elf, since faeries in Lorwyn-Shadowmoor essentially steal dreams. More specifically, they use “sleep glamers” to induce a trancelike state in other beings that allows them to distill dreams into energy that they carry around like bee pollen. That’s then used as their primary source of sustenance. The elf here is supposedly consenting to this odd romance, but that doesn’t negate the fact that this specific relationship is sort of like Peter Pan falling in love with Tinker Bell instead of Wendy.

Across seven years and nine different printings with a total of four different art variations, Run Away Together still plays exactly the same. But each new iteration seems to say something unique about intimacy, consent, and who gets to define love in Magic’s worlds.