Companion is one of the most disastrous Magic: The Gathering mechanics of all time. The way the entire thing functioned had to be nerfed pretty quickly, and even after that, half of all companion cards still ended up banned in at least one format. It's a 9 on the Storm scale, and head designer Mark Rosewater admits companions caused "all sorts of problems".
So it's quite surprising to see that the designers were considering putting something very similar into Lorwyn Eclipsed. As the vision design handoff doc published on Wizards' website explains, the scrapped keyword 'leader' is "an experimental keyword in the companion-adjacent space".
That obviously sets off alarm bells and has me thinking we may have dodged a bullet with this MTG set. But what exactly was leader, and would it have been as scary as the most terrifying mechanic Wizards ever produced?
Like companions, the leader cards devised for Lorwyn would be additional cards you could play from your sideboard. But whereas companions required you to fulfil a deckbuilding restriction to include them in your deck, these would only care about the current game state.
There would've been one Lorwyn leader card for each of the plane's eight creature types: kithkin, elementals, merfolk, goblins, elves, treefolk, giants, and changelings. The example given in the document is a faerie leader which costs 1B to move from the sideboard to your hand, and has an additional cost of tapping six power's worth of faeries.
We don't know what it did, but apparently Wizards wanted leaders to be "a splashy, exciting typal element, primarily for Constructed".
Honestly, that sounds a lot less frightening than companion was. Having to achieve a specific board state and then undergo an extra cost to move the leader card to your hand means it's not simply an eight card available to you at all times.
Leader could've been a cool way to support Lorwyn tribal decks, but I imagine it would be hard to balance. Make too many hoops and you have a win-more card that's almost never worth playing over, include too few and you end up with companions 2.0.
"If it sticks, there are plenty of rules and Commander questions to be worked out, and some of those conversations have already started," the design document states. Obviously, for whatever reason, it did not!
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