expansion acted as a bit of a prologue for this whole Weatherlight Saga and acted as an introduction and recruitment storyline for our bunch of heroes, the story starts proper in the Rath Block, starting off with the large expansion Tempest and continuing on with two smaller expansions, Stronghold and Exodus. Much of the storyline is told via the novel
, and it involves the crew of the Skyship Weatherlight going off to infiltrate the artificial plane of Rath, ruled by the despotic villain Volrath, in order to rescue their captain and to prevent some sort of large apocalypse.
And, again, we have a bunch of cards that sort of tell the story of the events of
as Weatherlight's crew goes off buggering into the plane of Rath. This time around, I'm going to leave the story-related cards
the page break, while talking more about general monsters and flavour of the cards -- I was definitely a bit too wordy with
, which I could stand to do because it's a smaller expansion block and it's the first storyline in the Weatherlight saga, but I don't think I'll necessarily be able to keep it up indefinitely for the entire rest of the series. So...
I did complain that the previous expansion,
Weatherlight, didn't have a great representation of the actual main characters in the story. Sure, the likes of Gerrard, Tahngarth and Mirri do show up on a lot of cards, just under half of the cards in the set in fact, but without paying close attention to the flavour text or accompanying fiction, it'd be hard-pressed to realize that these are meant to be characters and not just a random adventurer. And while the actual main characters aren't still represented as individual cards of their own (maybe they're saving it for the climax?), the arc-relevant characters do show up.
The main villain of this storyline is the evil mad scientist Volrath, who has created the artificial plane of doom and horrors called Rath, and is preparing to royally fuck over Dominaria. Or something. Volrath doesn't show up as a card himself (though he shows up in some cards' artwork), but two of his minions do.
Commander Greven il-Vec is an evil bald man with some really mighty neck muscles and an evil spiky black armour, and he's essentially the arc villain that menaces the crew of the
Weatherlight, commanding an evil skyship and apparently being forced and/or brainwashed to submission by Volrath. Not the most interesting design, I admit, but it's all right for a pretty basic villain.
Vhati il-Dal is also a villain, and the treacherous second-in-command of Greven. He's got some really intense dreadlocks going on there! He's Black/Green, so I guess he's got some nature-loving deal going on in addition to being evil? Not going to go too deep about their stories, that's going to be saved after the break.
And now we have two members of the
Weatherlight crew.
Orim, Samite Healer apparently has been in the background of the previous
Weatherlight stories, but hasn't shown up in card art until now. She's... she's there. She's just a lady in a turban.
Starke of Rath is also just some dude with standard fantasy outfit and a knife, and he's basically the token evil teammate among the Weatherlight crew, having infiltrated their group while posing as a 'local guide' to Rath in the final recruitment arc throughout the story of the
Weatherlight expansion. Again, he's kinda generic. It's all right to have some characters that are just-a-human, but... y'know, it gets boring after a while and I don't have much to say about either character.
We get a couple of local characters, too, with
Eladamri, Lord of Leaves, being the leader of the elven resistance who's living in the forests of Rath. He's sure an elf dude in armour!
The
Oracle en-Vec isn't a legendary card, but is
technically a character, as far as I can tell. He's the leader of a human tribe who assists our heroes. He's... he's sure a prophet-looking dude! By the way, the difference between the Rath-native characters with "en" and "il" basically boils down to the en-Vecs or whatever being good guys, and the il-Vecs and il-Dals being loyal to Volrath.
And we have
Selenia, Dark Angel, who's both Black and White, and her story's a bit more interesting. Design-wise she's just an angel lady with black wings, but she's actually a fallen angel! She used to be a Serra Angel who was transformed into a darker creature by the Phyrexians, and she became the jailer of Crovax, one of the Weatherlight crew... and Crovax fell in love with Selenia because of Stockholm's Syndrome, I guess. Throughout the events of the
Weatherlight expansion, Crovax attempted to 'rescue' Selenia by stealing the artifact that controlled her, and even destroyed the artifact after the rest of his family was killed by Morinfen and Gallowbraid, but Selenia's still callous and unable of feeling love, leaving Crovax behind... until they meet again in this expansion, where she's straight-up returned to being a Phyrexian minion. She doesn't do much in this expansion other than cause Crovax to angst, but she does have a neat little mini-story.
One thing that
Tempest does well, and I argue this is something that they've been slowly building up towards, is to give each Plane a couple of unique creatures or cultures. They did do this a bit with
Fallen Empires with their Thrulls and Thallids and Homarids, but in
Tempest, I think we reach a particularly neat way of world-building, and as thus, I'm going to go through the various new races and groups first before we go into the more standalone monsters.
Look at
Soltari Foot Soldier here! One of the many races in the plane of Rath are the Soltari, a race of spirit-like beings that are trapped in Rath's shadows. When Volrath created Rath, three factions were trapped in a maelstrom of energy during the plane-shifting, and they all ended up being trapped in a shadowy dimension called "The Shadows", trapped in this in-between plane, unable to truly interact with either Dominaria or Rath. They all have the keyword "Shadow", representing how they can only interact with others in their own shadowy dimension. They can't be hurt by physical creatures, but they can't hurt them either.
All the Soltari are able to maintain their mental states due to their religion offering them peace and solidarity, which is why they're all still relatively sane. And also, they're all White-mana creatures, and, hooray, we're getting cool White creatures at last! While the Soltari Foot-Soldier up there just looks like a regular chalk-skinned humanoid with a lumpy head,
Soltari Trooper's completely fucked-up flesh-blob body shows that these Soltari dudes have really been transformed by their planeshifting. Or were they already bizarrely malformed in the first place? Whatever the case, man, look at this dude's intensely bent spine, the horrifying way those arms are connected to the torso, that random protrusion on his back... and yet he's not a monster, he's just a regular trooper of a race of warrior-priests.
Sadly, the contorted body-shape seems to be the exception rather than the norm, because the
Soltari Monk, even though he has a head that looks like it belongs to a
Star Wars alien, is just a regular dude with a robe.
Or is he? You never know what's under those robes...
Soltari Crusader has a more mundane body shape than the Trooper, but what
is that thing he's riding? Is it some sort of bizarre rhinoceros-like beast made out of swirling masses of cloth? It's an interesting mount. Or is it even a separate creature at all? We know so little about the Soltari physiology that I wouldn't be surprised if it's part of the Crusader's anatomy. Also, their flavour text detail that the Soltari are at war with another race, the Dauthi.
Soltari Lancer is another trooper, and while he's also a mounted knight-man, where the Crusader looks more like it's smooth and flowing, the Lancer's art shows his weird spirit-flesh of being more bubbly and sinewy. I do like that
Magic: The Gathering is finally starting to branch out and create a bunch of new races, instead of relying solely on White creatures being the same old human paladins and clerics and monks all the time. The Soltari aren't
super creative, but I do really like that we're at least trying to branch out among the design of White creatures.
And here we have the Dauthi, the enemies of the Soltari. We're not sure if they looked exactly like this prior to their plane-shift, but now they're a bunch of insane-looking monsters -- all of them would receive the "Dauthi" tag retroactively.
Dauthi Ghoul is perhaps the most mundane of these creatures, just being an angry shadowy creature with a massive, fanged face. It's a cool shadowy ghoul for sure, but at this point in
Magic's history we've got a fair amount of shadowy demon-men with long claws and sharp teeth. Considering all of these "Shadow" creatures are meant to exist in a creepy shadowy dimension just adjacent of ours, though, the fact that the evil ones basically look nightmarish does work thematically.
Duathi Horror, meanwhile, looks distinctively more corporeal, and I have no idea what the fuck's going on with that face. It's almost trumpet-like, ending with a maw full of teeth, and that chest has bizarre muscle anatomy. It's still humanoid and straddles the line on being goofy and threatening. I like it. It's weird.
Duathi Mercenary, meanwhile, is a knight mounted on a beast, and what the
fuck is going on here? I'm not sure what's going on, but it definitely does look like the sort of enemy from a 90's extreme-violence game. The Mercenary's armour (or body) is made almost entirely of spikes, and so is the beast's head, which is some sort of unholy fusion between a ram, an iron plate and three dozen knives. I like this thing. It's so over-the-top.
And finally we end at my favourite Dauthi, the only non-humanoid one, the
Dauthi Mindripper. What
is this thing? We don't really know what it is other than the fact that it's a "Dauthi" and a "minion", and we don't have any flavour text to go off on. How big is it? Is it like a tiny parasite, or a dog-sized beast, or a giant monster? How does that anatomy work, with a pair of frog-like legs that end in massive claws, and two fangs that look like some hideous animal skull with sharp teeth, with creepy, sinewy flesh wrapped around it? The Mindripper honestly looks so fucking weird. I love this thing, and it gets my vote for the most "what the hell" creature design of this set.
The Soltari are peaceful and organized, the Dauthi are chaotic evil monsters, and we have a third faction that's blasted into the shadow realm, the Thalakos. Who are just driven insane by the jump to the shadow realm. And they... they look kinda-sorta weird? The
Thalakos Dreamsower has my favourite artwork among the Thalakos, showing off this massive humanoid figure trapping another person under his hand and just looking lazily at them. There's random spines and spikes and veins, and parts of his cheek skin being pulled away like silly putty, but the title "Dreamsower" makes it ambiguous if this is just the appearance that the creature takes in dreams, or if it's literally just a giant,dude with weird veins and goopy skin.
Thalakos Mistfolk, meanwhile, is just a bunch of dudes with apparently skull-faces that, judging by their name, moves around in the mist. That one on the bottom right seems to even have two faces under the hood! Not as interesting as the Dreamsower, but definitely does look pretty weird.
Thalakos Sentry would look humanoid if not for the weird head, that just juts forwards like some bizarre turtle-man. Look a bit closer into the artwork and you realize that the hand isn't quite bent the same way like a human's, and his legs taper off into tendrils. Yeah, these creatures are apparently made out of the mists and shadows, and I do like that there's not a shred of uniformity among the Thalakos designs in this set.
Thalakos Seer, meanwhile, is just so fucked up. Her body is vaguely humanoid, but look at the ends of her legrs and arms, which just fray apart into wibbly-wobbly string nonsense that join with other strings, look at that frayed arm exposing musculature, and especially her head, which just looks so bizarrely torn apart to shreds. Like, the Soltari and the Thalakos have some sort of weird "cloth being pulled into ribbons" aesthetic going on among them. It's not going to last, especially in subsequent expansions, but I really do enjoy their attempt at portraying this race of mysterious beings that got ripped apart by dimensional magic and now live in this mutated, twisted state between dimensions.
And here we are with the Slivers, a cycle of monsters that span all five colours. Each colour gets two Sliver sub-types, and they're apparently this hideous abomination native to the plane of Rath... and they're a pretty cool creature! Drawing somewhat from
Alien, the Slivers have such a bizarre anatomy. They have a swept-back
Alien-esque head, no eyes, a beak, a somewhat humanoid-like chest, a single mantis-like talon that juts out of one side of the chest, and two long whip-like tails that it slithers around (or floats around) on. Like, it's one of those monster designs that doesn't quite correspond to anything in nature and looks so unnatural, but you kinda believe that this is a combination of features that would function in a way, yeah? Visually, each Sliver is slightly mutated thanks to either the general nature of the species (is some
Alien-esque or Chimera-Ant-esque biology going on here?) or Volrath's experiments. Gameplay wise, each Sliver basically buffs all the other Slivers on the board, basically being one of the more synergistic tribal-buffing archetype in early
Magic. The unique thing is that
all Slivers on board get this ability, not just yours, and the flavour, I think, is the presence of, say, a Mindwhip Sliver in the battlefield means that all of the Slivers gain the 'mind-whip' ability based on their unique biology. Sharing
is caring!
Anyway, we're going to cover all the Slivers here, because I love them. We'll start off with Black's
Mindwhip Sliver, which is a neat design to start off with because it doesn't deviate too much from the standard Sliver body-shape. It has some neat little "white flesh with red blood-marks" texture going on, looking like something from a 2000's horror game, and a bunch of extra spikes on its back and head, but ultimately, the Mindwhip Sliver is a neat, simple design to illustrate what the Slivers look like.
The
Clot Sliver, meanwhile, looks particularly hideous. One of the few Slivers to have eyes, or at least eye-like growths, the Clot Sliver's tapering Xenomorph skull splits into four almost metallic-like prongs, exposing the gooey pink brain inside. Its beak looks almost like one of those hadrosaurs, and the combination of its slobber and the blood on its talons really sell the Clot Sliver as a hideously dangerous beast. Each Sliver has an ever-so-slightly different design from the others, keeping the same basic anatomy but adding or substracting enough to make them really feel cohesive in a way that the Dauthi or Thalakos don't necessarily do. It's neat!
We're just going by colour order, and next up is the swarm of
Winged Sliver, which really do feel pretty Pterosaur-like. They have a bunch of leathery, silver wings that also apparently extend as a web between their two tails, and their swept-back head has been covered with a metallic, sharp Pterosaur-esque armour piece. It's a cool design, even if it does admittedly make the Sliver a bit more mundane looking since now they just look like mutated birds. The Winged Sliver basically allows all Slivers on the battlefield to gain flying, so they spontaneously sprout wings as long as the Winged Sliver is alive or something? Flying's a very Blue ability to have, so it's definitely neat.
Mnemonic Sliver is a neat little close-up view of the Sliver's head, and since Blue's the colour of intelligence and general mind-manipulating powers, this Sliver has a massive, creepy exposed brain with loads and loads of veins between the gyri and sulci of the brain. I'm not sure if it's just the art perspective, or if this Mnemonic Sliver just has a particularly large chunk of brain that bulges out off the side of the normally sleek and slender Sliver skull. It also kind of gives the image of some sort of fucked-up set of eye sockets, too. Pretty wacky!
Horned Sliver is another Sliver that's basically a more basic-looking one, although this one looks decidedly more like a malnourished animal as opposed to the grodier Black-mana Slivers. The Horned Sliver's skull splits into two horns, and he's got a bunch of horns running down its spine, and I do like the nasty-looking sinews and muscles that run down this thing's neck. Not the most exciting one, but another one that kinda looks 'basic' enough to kind of showcase the classic look of what Slivers are meant to look like.
Because without a baseline point to know what Slivers look like, you probably won't appreciate the more drastic-looking ones, like the
Muscle Sliver, which is apparently one of the most ubiquitous Slivers in the actual metagame, because of the simple ability of the muscle Sliver causing all of your other Slivers to basically go Bane and be buff and get +1/+1. Its got a face that wouldn't look out of place in an
Alien movie, and it's swapped out its mantis claw for two massive dinosaur/dragon-like talons. While a drastic departure from the sleeker Sliver designs, it does look pretty monstrous, and if nothing else, does fit with the name of a "muscle" sliver. Not sure if I like this, honestly, but it sure does look different!
The
Barbed Sliver's anatomy sort of confuses me, because this thing looks a bit more like a weird octopus with a giant head and a bunch of tentacles, until I realized that the Sliver is facing towards you, the lower limb is the Sliver's chest-arm, and those two whips are the tails pointing away from you. This one honestly kind of feels like it would've fit with Green a bit better, since it has that whole 'bramble' vibe going along with it? Hell, even the flavour text notes that the Barbed Sliver can create giant deadly hedges out of its Sliver buddies! Like the Horned Sliver, this one has a pretty cool dual-horned head, looking like a sinister robot antelope or something.
The
Heart Sliver looks super-duper metal, and while the Muscle Sliver has the
Alien Xenomorph's grinning fanged face, the Heart Sliver has the Xenomorph's weird organic-looking-but-also-metallic-looking skin. This thing's head just looks so bizarrely cluttered, and while I'm not sure why this thing is specifically called the 'heart' Sliver, it's a pretty nasty-looking design. Also, worth noting is that both the Heart and Clot Sliver show that these creatures apparently hang and perch on stalactites like some twisted bat, except they live in a specific area in Rath that overlooks a lava pool.
And we reach White, with the
Armor Sliver, which has the classic Sliver body design (albeit drawn in the artist's unique style), and doesn't feel super-armoured until I realize that the bizarre outgrowth from its spine that also jut out to become some sort of bizarre external ribs might probably be what the armour is meant to be. Apparently even the in-universe characters are confused how this armour works, although I guess weird bony protrusions is a neat enough handwave to show how the Slivers are able to spontaneously gain +1 Health.
Talon Sliver has a pretty neat colouration, and I think the intention is to show that it's glowing red due to some sort of red glowing energy from its chest. It's got a neat segmented head that looks like a bird's plumage, and the rest of its body looks delightfully metallic. It doesn't really
have a whole lot of anything special on its talon, though, which, in fact, actually looks shorter than most of the Slivers in this expansion. Did they swap Talon and Heart Sliver's names? Like, Talon Sliver has a glowing chest while Heart Sliver's head looks like a particularly nasty, large talon.
And we have
Metallic Sliver, an artificial creature that is apparently created by Volrath in order to influence the Sliver hive. So I guess Volrath didn't actually create the Slivers, but is manipulating them through his artificial creations? There's nothing super special about this thing, it has the basic Sliver anatomy and doesn't even look artificial, but I guess that's the point -- it's
meant to look generic and part of the hive, in order to fool the Slivers into accepting it.
Another creature type introduced here is the Licid, and the Licid are a bunch of parasitic creatures that enhances a creature, but at the price of dealing some kind of drawback to its controller. It basically looks like a weird combination of octopus, slug and insect, and we don't really get a whole lot of lore other than the fact that some people in Rath use them as basically steroids.
Leeching Licid here seems to actually just straight-up go Facehugger on that poor dude, though.
We have a cycle of Licids, and it's interesting how the
Stinging Licid and the
Enraging Licid seem to be taking over uncooperative hosts, while the tiger-man in
Nurturing Licid and the elf in
Quickening Licid seem to be a lot less disturbed at attaching a weird slug-octopus parasite to their body. I do love my parasitic monsters, but there isn't a whole ton to talk about here. The Licids are cool conceptually, and I do like how they function mechanically, but visually they're all a bit samey and we don't have any lore or flavour text to talk about.
And now we have the 'notable creatures', where these are all kinda random creatures that aren't affiliated with any of the groups above. Rath is a murder-plane of doom, so there's a whole load of spooky creepy monsters in it! Like
Servant of Volrath. Volrath is big on experimentation. And while he does his fair share of making demons, undead and Phyrexian cyborg-undead nightmares, sometimes this results in something like the Servant of Volrath, which is a fucked-up Frankensteined monster of random creatures. Four arms, two of which come from a giant crab and an octopus; an oversized ogre-demon head; furry legs; spiky back shell.... yeah, this is a pretty horrifying amalgamation. It's also hilarious and charming enough to not be 100% terrifying, but maybe that's part of Volrath's sinister plan, to make you drop your guard while this thing murders you with its crab claws and the tiny little shiv.
Pit Imp would've been a boring little devil imp-person if not for that amazingly hilarious face. Eyes on top and on the bottom of the imp's grinning mouth? A mirrored head that juts down from the chin? That's some gloriously weird anatomy, and this definitely makes this cheeky little imp particularly neat!
Carrionette is a glorious pun. It's apparently a bunch of weird shadowy hair or worms or tendrils reanimating a skeleton (or part of a skeleton) with a gigantic knife attached to one hand. Or is it a skeleton exuding the hair-like structure? Either way, the Carrionette is actually a monster encountered by the Weatherlight crew in their journey to get to Volrath, and it's certainly a weird skeleton monster! I like him.
Kezzerdrix is a horrifying creature and I do not like it. It's a hdieous bunny-man with the most disturbing-looking photorealistic animal skull face, some really hideous looking muscles, the most sinister grin, and honestly, looking like a naked muscle man with bunny features and the most deranged face just adds so much unsettling implications to this. What the fuck, the more I look at this thing, the more disturbed I am.
What
is Souldrinker? "Spirit" is sort of an ambiguous tribal term thta you can slap onto anything vaguely ghostly, and this particular spirit is a giant tumorous blob with a bunch of weird human-like limbs, as well as some that are a cross between a limb and a tentacle. It's totally choking the
shit out of this random Viking man, while presumably drinking his soul with... with that weird proboscis-like structure that's stuck down the dude's neck. Is the Viking dude expressionless because he doesn't haev a soul with which to feel? I'm not sure how these thing really works, just that I am disturbed by what's going on in this picture. The background of the image shows what appears to be the Souldrinker's "default" state, which is some
War of the Worlds tripod machine thing. Pretty creepy!
Coffin Queen's pretty neat! I do like her weird four arms, the way she's doing a weird variation of the Michael Jackson Moonwalk with how her legs and spine are posed, and I do like the artwork of the blood moon behind her and the army of skeletons rising up from the grave. I dunno. THis is a pretty cool sorceress lady.
Oh man,
Bellowing Fiend looks fucked up. Sure, he's got a regular old demon body with muscles and spikes and bat wings and all, but between the mismatched ram horns and that completely fucked-up demon face that's a mass of screaming toothy maws and haphazard eyes, man, apparently this thing just yells a lot so much that it deals damage to both you and your opponent due to its indiscriminate bellowing. I guess "Spirit" is just what they're replacing "Demon" and "Devil" with? Like, this thing is obviously a 'demon', right?
Blood Pet is the surprise return of the Thrulls, those poor race of malformed creatures made to be sacrificed by a crazy cult in
Fallen Empires, and one of my favourite M:TG original races. Volrath apparently has his own Thrulls, and one of it is this pathetic-looking creature called a blood pet, which looks like something out of
The Night Before Christmas, with a lumpy rat-like body, a very sad-looking eyeball, and stitches all over. It's a bit of a departure from the other Thrulls from
Fallen Empires, which tended to look less ratty, but it's a welcome return of an old creature type, and on such an adorably sad little creature. It's like this thing
knows it exists just to be sacrificed for mana advantage!
Volrath really loves his experiments, and this includes
Spinal Graft, which looks so goddamn uncomfortable. His patient-victim is strapped onto this bizarre operating bed with metal octopus tentacles while a metallic spine is surgically implanted by Volrath... who wears some sort of fucking bizarre monocle contraption. What happens to the original spine? What use is a metal spine (as opposed to, say, metallic sword arms or jetpack boots or laser eyes or whatever, if you're making a cyborg) in a primarily magic-based fantasy world? Volrath's craaaazy.
We're going into Blue, and I include
Benthic Behemoth here just because I really like the artwork for this giant reptile-whale beast. It's also a
serpent, meaning that we're just looking at the head of a far, far larger eel-like creature, which is pretty cool looking!
And here we have the Rootwater merfolk, and the merfolk of Rath don't look like extras from
The Little Mermaid or even fishmen from Aquaman comics. Rather, look at just how gloriously spooky the
Rootwater Diver is! A face like a predatory deep-sea fish; long, tapering claws with webs; spiky fins down the tail, tendrils running down his face... The Rootwater merfolk are apparently warped when the plane of Rath was created, but man, they look cool and also pretty damn horrifying! Honestly, they look like they should audition for a more badass adaptation of Lovecraft's Deep Ones.
Rootwater Hunter is a lot less creepy, but I absolutely love those glowing dead eyes, as well as the massive, beautiful fins attached to a skinny body that make it look like the merfolk equivalent of a leafy sea-dragon. Which is pretty damn cool looking, and I argue moreso than the monstrous Diver.
Rootwater Matriarch takes a different approach, with her face seemingly not even having mouth but instead made up of a mass of dots, while her head and arms are covered with coral protrusions. The rest of her body look eel-like but nowhere as mutated as the first two Rootwater merfolk, other than her massive, long-webbed hands. Pretty cool variation that still manages to look more monstrous and unnaturally animal-like, while also not looking as spooky as the Rootwater Diver.
And also the Rootwater folk ride manta rays, becoming the
Manta Riders. These riders look far more mundane, though, and nowhere as monstrous as the other Rootwaters. The idea of merpeople riding giant fishes is rad as hell, though, and I'm not complaining too much. This is neat.
What the
FUCK is the
Mawcor? It's a big-ass creature that's like almost entirely a gigantic maw attached to a pair of bat wings, and said maw looks more like a fucked-up set of tongs. I'm not even sure how the anatomy works. He appears to just go straight from being a giant maw to a tail, so where do all the food it digests go to? Apparently, it's also able to unleash blasts of winds. How does this creature survive in the wild? Or does it even do so? It's so weird, I love it.
Flyamarid is just a gigantic flying yellow squid. It's a flying yellow squid that's also a giant, shooting ink sprays that make other creatures into Blue creatures, and apparently, by virtue of being a giant yellow flying squid, it cannot be blocked by Blue creatures. I'm not sure what the
fuck is going on, and why Blue creatures can't block the Flyamarid, but its name is glorious, and it's a giant flying yellow squid. What's there to question?
We've got two shapeshifters, and I love how the
Escaped Shapeshifter is just trying to mimic these weird two-legged kangaroo-armadillo reptile creatures drinking from the lake. Like, it's trying so hard to mimic the general shape, but gets the details wrong and the colours wrong! Poor dude, he's
trying his best, okay?
Unstable Shapeshifter is a creature that the crew fights in the journey, and apparently this particular creature will reflexively transform into any creature in play, continually moving in a flux and becoming copies of whatever creature you or your opponent most recently summons into the battlefield. The artwork isn't the most clear due to how the creature's transforming in the backrground, but it's changing from what appears to be a red frog into Mirri, the cat-lady from the
Weatherlight crew, with the entire head of a human-sized cat-person morphing out of the body of a tiny frog.
I have
no fucking idea what's going on with the
Krakilin. It's a beast that is apparently "brutal, fetal and lacking truth", and it's just... it's just this mass of screaming faces, some of which are attached to snake-necks. The more I look at this thing, the more confused I am. And I'm even more confused that this is a Green-mana monster, so it's meant to be natural... but what in god's earth looks even remotely like that?
Crazed Armodon is one of the three "Armodon" cards in this set, but I'm using one to represent them. Armodons are apparently this bizarre species of elephants with mottled, armoured skin, and a fuck-ton of extra spiky growths and an extra pair of tusks. They're like,
extreme elephants, and they're apparently used by the Rath elves as mounts,
Lord of the Rings style.
Canopy Spider is a critter that I sort of debated back and forth on including in the 'notable monsters' list, but hey, I like spiders, and this is a spider that hangs out and decorates her massive web with human skulls. That's pretty neat.
Skyshroud Troll, meanwhile, is... it's an interesting troll. On the top of my head I'm not sure what, exactly, this creature design reminds me of, but between that dumb-but-angry lizard face, the turtle shell, the massive lower arms with sausage fingers, the Skyshroud Troll definitely looks pretty interestingly weird, and a neat little variant from M:TG's trolls, which tend to just be ugly humans.
Verdant Force is an Elemental, and... and hoo boy, what a weird looking elemental he is, and I mean that as a compliment! He's not just a boring old tree-man or a Swamp Thing ripoff, but this is just this gangly humanoid figure covered with vines, random thorns, and the most "hurr durr get out of my swamp" face. He's like the Lorax, if the Lorax was that grumpy, unkempt old man living down your street instead of a happy mustachioed buddy.
Rootbreaker Wurm is actually a massive wurm that Gerrard ends up fighting through the course of this expansion's story, and apparently it eats those Rootwater merfolk! Wurms tend to just be giant worms with reptilian heads, but the Rootbreaker Wurm has a particularly gristy-looking one, with the creepy exposed gum-and-teeth thing going on and honestly, kinda looking like something out of
Alien.
Heartwood Treefolk is pretty... interesting. The Treefolk in M:TG tended to be giant trees with faces, basically a more whimsical adaptation of the Ents from Tolkien's work, but the Heartwood Treefolk is apparently a teeny-tiny tree person with gangly root-limbs and a lump of wood that very vaguely resembles a face with little dot-eyes, and it clambers up and down other trees. I like this thing! It's adorable.
I'm not 100% sure what the
Scragnoth is, but it's apparently some sort of... lizard creature with the most knotted, multi-joined creepy arms ever, and its head and shoulders are just this mass of colouration and spikes. It's apparently a creature that possesses "counter-intelligence", and this means it has complete protection from Blue spells. What
is this thing? Is it a natural beast of some sorts native to Rath that's somehow anti-smart? Is it an intelligence-feeder? What does the rest of the Scragnoth look like? What a bizarre-ass creature.
Spike Drone is a "Spike", a sort of a weird slug-like creature sort of introduced here, and what a weird-ass creature it is! It's got a slug body, but it's got these little weird pods that apparently shoot out little versions of itself out like cannons. but most weird is its face, which look like it should belong on some sort of weird mutant spider or solifugid, with rows of beady eyes and two massive fleshy fang-like protrusions. And it just launches its little babies out to buff up its ally creatures, which is just such a weird thing to do to your young. We're going to see more Spikes in the future, which is neat!
And here's an interesting Green enchantment, the
Frog Tongue, where your minion apparently grows a frog-like tongue, with which they can capture and draw in weird little bug-fairy people. What
is that bug-fairy man, by the way? All of the fairies we've seen in M:TG so far has been the same old humanoid ones, and I'm not saying that those are bad or anything, but there's so little variety! I guess Phil McFrogface here ate all the cooler bug fairies.
The Moggs are our resident goblin tribe for this one, and instead of being super-duper comedic, as
Mogg Squad shows, these are far, far more gross, bloodthirsty and creepy. More
Goblin Slayer and less
World of Warcraft. Pretty nasty looking creatures, whether it's the crowd of Mogg Goblins, or the singular
Mogg Raider jumping out towards the enemy. The Mogg Raider's flavour text and effect is interesting -- apparently the Moggs are very bloodthirsty goblins, and they get invigorated by the evisceration of one of their own, which is why when you sacrifice (i.e. kill) any goblin under your control, the Mogg Raider gets a bonus buff. Psychopaths!
And
Mogg Fanatic is just a straight-up suicide bomber. You sacrifice him as he just jumps out of a skyship to deal damage to your enemy at the cost of its own life. Poor man!
The
Shocker is a giantspider-like beast that lives in lava caves, and is actually an enemy that's specifically faced by our heroes in the story, which is pretty awesome for what would've been kind of an unremarkable creature in a set with so many monster factions already. It's got a fun design, with its base form being a spider, but also having weird little scorpion pincer-arms, as well as
two wasp-like stingers jutting out of its bum. One of which apparently glows with electricity, which is why this thing is called a Shocker. Either way, it's definitely an alien-looking arthropod, and even its effect is weird. A simple 1/1 bug, but when it damages a player, they have to discard their hand and draw a new one. That's a weird ability all right!
Lightning Elemental is an interesting one. Again, I really love how the elementals in M:TG isn't just weird half-humanoid genies, and this one is quite literally a mass of lightning bolts vaguely sprouting out of a cloud that also has a humanoid face etched onto it. It just looks so weirdly interpretative. I like it.
It's not super important in this particular block, but Flowstone's going to be something that's relevant in subsequent installments of the Rath block, because it's a powerful, malleable substance used by Volrath and his Phyrexian allies to keep increasing the mass of Rath and maintaining the artificial plane. But in addition to that, it can be used to make
Flowstone Giant, which is a creepy clay-rock giant with an angry face. I like this one.
More Flowstone creatures!
Flowstone Salamander is just a lizard made out of the flowstone, but I do like just how its rear body is melding into the rock around it, and I like how despite having eyes, it's clear that this rock creature doesn't really see.
Flowstone Wyvern isn't the only drake (or dragon) in this set, but it's got a pretty neat artwork and it ties to the whole Flowstone gimmick, which I guess is Red mana's "tribe" since they don't have any Shadow-related tribal mechanics or whatever. The Flowstone cards don't exactly have a keyword attached to them, but we get to see a bunch more of them across the block, and some of them have a +X/-X ability, presumably representing them shifting into a more powerful but more fragile form. Not the salamander, though, it knows it looks great and isn't going to change!
What
is a
Pallimud? I don't even know what's going on. It's a huge purple thing seemingly with multiple legs, and a weird kaiju-like face? And it's living in a caldera? I'm not sure what's going on here, other than it's vaguely reptilian, and apparently the Vec people are super afraid of it. Kinda wished we see more of this beast's anatomy, honestly, but I do like the idea of prehistoric Kaiju-like monsters in general, and being able to only see part of an immense monster is pretty neat.
Goblin Bombardment shows that the creative team are still having some fun with the goblins at least, because despite being more serious, the goblins of Rath still don't know how the fuck to use a giant ballista, because they still apparently launch their own in order to operate it. "One mogg to steer the rock", apparently, which... I mean, sure, why not, silly goblins? Interestingly, you don't have to necessarily sacrifice a goblin for this to work, you can sacrifice, say, a Pallimud, or a dragon, or a golem, or an orc... but the damage is
still 1 damage, whatever you launch on your goblin siege engine. Silly goblins.
We don't have a lot of interesting White creatures to talk about, as usual, but
Auratog is our Atog of the expansion, and this one is a skinny goblin with a grinning face! Other Atogs tend to look more like frog-men or lizard-men, but the Auratog probably is the one who has the most human-like body shape. It eats auras, which in this case means enchantments.
Master Decoy is just here because I
really love the look on this dude's face. He's got like four white flags on his back, he's got a fancy looking coat, and he's riding on a zebra unicorn. And he is apparently distracting an entire army running through random purple grass! I just really, really like this artwork. Phil Foglio is one of my favourite
Magic: The Gathering artists, thanks to just how zany his artwork are, and I'm sad that his artwork tends to be phased out in a lot of the later sets. I think the Tempest block is the last one we ever get to see his artwork. Boo!
Speaking of Phil Foglio, look at the card artwork for
Humility! I'm genuinely not 100% sure what's going on, but I think the robed skeleton dude and the dargon goober are like, performing in an alleyway, like they are street magicians? I love this art piece a lot. It's just so random.
Artifact creatures now! The
Telethopter is one of our first Thopters (basically steampunk helicopters), and this one looks like it's some crazy-ass post-apocalyptic
Mad Max vehicle with a giant kite stapled on top of it. I love it. Apparently, the goddamn Moggs pilot the Telethopters, and as goblins are wont to do, they cause a lot of accidents. Silly Moggs!
Patchwork Gnomes and
Bottle Gnomes are neat-looking! I really do love how M:TG's gnomes are basically a huge, huge pun on garden gnomes, making a fun little running joke. I like that the Patchwork Gnomes are apparently tiny little helpers, and I absolutely love the one in the foreground with just a single huge wheel. Bottle Gnomes apparently are just portable 1/3 creatures that fight for you, but can be cracked open and drank like a potion in a pinch. It's certainly an interesting artifact creature, for sure, basically making a potion bottle come to life!
A bunch more Phyrexian war-machines! Volrath is allied with Phyrexia, technically, so of course he's going to have a couple of Phyrexian minions! Like the
Phyrexian Splicer, which is a combination of a torture machine and psychotic robot surgeon. This one looks like it's stitching together some sort of Frankenstein monster, and the imagery of the giant nail and that one prominent robotic arm puling the strings taut is just pretty spooky.
Phyrexian Hulk is a simple, giant hulking monster, with massive shoulders, a tiny head, a dome-like structure above the head, and a hunched-over 'spine'. For something that doesn't seem like it has any real anatomy, I do like that the artwork really do manage to imply a hulking brute without having a strictly humanoid form.
Phyrexian Grimoire is another Phyrexian-related artifact, and I really do like that this basically combined the concept of a vile book of unholy secrets like the Necronomicon or something, but instead of regular eyeballs and Cthulhu tentacles, it's
metallic robot eyeballs and wires. It's not the most consistent aesthetic, but I do like it when we have the techno-organic aesthetic being played up.
Energizer looks just so tormented, with that disproportionately large metallic face. He kinda looks like a half-transformed Transformer, in pain because he's not quite robot or vehicle, and he's just running around with his wheely lower body and his upper body that's approximately 60% pointy ends. I actually like this thing. It just looks so cobbled-together but also deadly at the same time.
Dracoplasm is a pretty interesting creature! It's a blue/red dual-coloured card, and it's apparently a shapeshifter... but a shapeshifter that seemingly exclusively only takes the forms of dragons. And it basically consumes your creatures and gains power and toughness depending on the creatures you sacrifice. It's also got a pretty dang cool artwork.
You gotta love goblins.
Squee's Toy is an artifact, and I don't even know what that is. It's a weird porcelain figure of some sort of bizarre mutant cat? Squee loves it, and apparently it's the goblin equivalent of a comfort blanket. I'm not sure if the toy is going to be surprisingly important in the plot in some way or another. I kinda have the feeling that it's one of those innocuous joke objects that turn out to be part of the plot or something, y'know?
As we continue with the second episode of Batwoman, we jump head-long into the Kate/Beth sisterly storyline, and it's... it's interesting? It's not the first time that a superhero show has had the hero's missing, long-thought-dead relative end up being a villain (see also: Emiko Adachi, Astra, half the cast of Gotham), but I do think that the way that these first two episodes of Batwoman did go through the expected beats pretty well. The surprise revelation at the end of the pilot is a huge cliffhanger, and a good chunk of this episode has Kate -- and because she couldn't keep her mouth shut, the rest of the cast -- trying to figure out if Alice really is Beth. And as the audience, we know she 100% is, because to pussyfoot out of that revelation would be anticlimactic as hell, but Kate doesn't know that. And there's just that delicious bit of ambiguity when Alice whispers to Kate about how she might be Beth, or she might just model herself after what she read online. That's actually pretty well-scripted.
Mary's storyline was seeded throughout the episode as something that was neat world-building but ultimately felt like it was just there to sort of set up the character for later. Oh, she's got an illegal clinic, clearly an interesting locale for a vigilante show. She ends up getting attacked and eventually rescued by Batwoman, which is pretty awesome... but then at the end of the episode, when Mary finally meets Kate again, we learn that Mary's been really trying to get close to her cold, aloof older step-sister but all Kate is concerned about is chasing the ghost of Beth. That's some pretty neat acting.
Family's clearly the huge theme of this episode, whether it's the interactions between Kate and Beth, Kate and Mary, Kate and Jacob (both past and present)... but the other parts of the show also work pretty well. Luke Fox is trying his best to live up to both his father and Batman's legacy, pointing out just how gung-ho Kate has been about everything, and he's an interesting 'guy in the chair' supporting character. In contrast, though, I felt like Sophia's storyline was a bit underwhelming. Nothing really wrong with that, of course, and I do like just how hard of a decision it must be for Sophia to move from her loyalty to Kate as an ex-girlfriend or to inform Jacob that Kate might be doing something stupid, but ultimately I find her character a bit too flat for my liking. Ultimately, though, it's still pretty fantastic superhero fare. I wouldn't go as far as to say that Batwoman so far has been like, revolutionary or anything, but it's definitely a very solid storyline and acting so far.
