So, after we leave behind the trilogy of Urza's Saga, we continue back to the present day storyline with the crew of the Weatherlight escaping the plane of Rath and crash-landing on a completely different plane -- Mercadia. Which, if I'm not mistaken, is going to be how we're going to basically have an excuse for new planes and new settings for the next couple of expansions. As usual, we have an accompanying novel detailing the saga of the crew of the Weatherlight as they explore this new plane.Reading the quick synopsis over on the MTG Wiki, basically it's a typical hijinks-in-a-new-fantasy-setting bit, where the Weatherlight ship (and the cleric Orim) gets captured by the rebel faction of the Cho-Arrim, while the rest of the crew are arrested by soldiers from Mercadia City. Mercadia itself is an extremely mercantile-driven city, with the nobles being hedonistic and lazy, while the commoners are selfish and paranoid. Turns out that the ruling Mercadians are greedy bastards that oppress the people under them, and the Cho-Arrim think that the Weatherlight's explosive arrival in Mercadia is a sign that their sky god, Ramos, will return to liberate them. Orim becomes sympathetic to the plight of the Cho-Arrim.
However, Gerrard and the rest of the crew are given a proposition by the Mercadian magistrate, who gives Gerrard a platoon of soldiers and assassin-mercenaries called the Cateran, sending them off to recover their ship. In the ensuing battle, the Caterans slaughter many Cho-Arrim. Afterwards, the crew makes a deal with the magistrate to repair their ship, and a group of Weatherlight crewmen travel to Saprazzo, a rival trade city inhabited by merfolk (who, in this plane, are able to switch between fish tails and humanoid legs at will) in order to secure an artifact required to fix the ship. Eventually, the crew of the Weatherlight manages to escape, and they discover the ruins of an ancient Thran site and battles a huge, mechanical war-machine, and turns out that the sky god Ramos is a Thran artifact.
And then they're off to the next plane, because the storyline for Mercadian Masques is basically kind of a standalone distraction and a pit-stop. I do like the set a bit, and as a larger set it does have a fair amount of interesting cards, but the lack of an unifying theme does kind of hurt its memorability a bit for me.
- Click here for the previous part, Unglued.
- Click here for the next part, Nemesis.
- Click here for the index.
As usual, my favourite monsters come from the Black cards, and while we don't quite have as many Phyrexian techno-organic horrors as the Rath or Urza blocks, we do have one of my favourite horrors so far, the Delraich, which... that's an awesome name. To my knowledge, it's a made-up word, but it suits this thing very well, yeah? It has a superficially humanoid form that might be passed off as just another flesh-monster like a zombie or whatever, but I really do like the formless, dome-like lack of a head and the gigantic maw on the Delraich's stomach region with finger-like protrusions jutting out of it. It just looks so creepy and weird, and that's before you notice the screaming faces sewn and melted into the Delraich's 'torso'. I do like just how much the faces actually blend into the creepy flesh of the Delraich's form, and it's not until I read the flavour text that I actually looked for the souls that are worn as the Delraich's "jewels on a chain". I also assume that said souls are the three black creatures that you sacrifice to summon the Delraich?
One of the big tribes in Mercadian Masques is the Mercenary tribe, but for whatever reason, in Mercadia the definition of 'mercenary' apparently isn't just warriors and cutthroats hanging out in a tavern waiting for a contract, but, uh, whatever this Cateran Brute is? Some kind of gigantic, muscular, hairy ogre-beast thing with fangs? Apparently the Cateran Brute isn't even a proper mercenary, but rather the 'public relations' of the Cateran Guild according to the flavour text, and, I suppose, some sort of recruiter, operator or front-man for the organization since it has a tutor effect? I absolutely love how this huge, brutish looking thing is just sitting behind an undersized (for him) desk, probably about to negotiate some sort of a deal with the clients.
Here are a bunch more of the Cateran mercenaries, and they look pretty nasty. I'm not sure what they are. Humans? Horrors? Ogres or giants or trolls? Undead? Mutants? Well, thanks to the power of digital media, all of these older M:TG cards have had their creature types retconned and revised, and now know that the Cateran Guild is a guild filled with a bunch of horror mercenaries. And it's interesting, really, because for the most part, horrors in M:TG have been characterized as terrifying, mutated beings twisted by dark magic into things-that-should-not-be, so to see the idea of these horrors actually hanging out, waiting for contracts to be given to them before they go off on merry ol' mercenary jobs is... an interesting mental image. I really wish more of these have flavour text to see just the day-to-day life in a guild of horror mercenaries.
So who does the Cateran Brute have on the roster of the Cateran Guild company? We've got the Cateran Enforcer, who is a huge, four-armed humanoid thing with green skin and rippling muscles, and he's got some bug-esque fangs in place of a mustache and a giant spiky club for one of his arms. The Cateran Slaver, whose artwork is one of the most literal displays of Swampwalk, is also more or less humanoid, dragging along a cage of slaves like a horse dragging along a wagon. The Cateran Slaver has a real nasty, mean-looking expression to him; it really creeps me out a whole lot.
Sometimes, business is booming and you just don't have enough manpower, and the Cateran Guild apparently employ temps. But they're not just like you and me, regular Joe Schmoes that get work from an agency or a recruitment drive or whatever. No, the Cateran Guild uses Cateran Summons to conjure shadowy horror mercenaries from smoke or something. On first glance I thought that it's just a mangled amalgamation of limbs next to a tusked face, but I guess it's actually the same sort of general four-armed body-type as the Cateran Enforcer or Cateran Overlord?
Speaking of which, Cateran Overlord is the big boy of the Cateran mercenaries in the set, and he sure does look very metal. Four arms, Batman-style jagged gauntlets with blood dripping off them, a scythe for a weapon, that elongated... hair? Part of his skull? An ornament? I do like that while the rest of the Cateran Overlord looks like a badass butcher, his face is best described as a squashed grinning rat's face. That's not a complaint, it's such an unconventional visual, and I do really love that TCG's basically allow artists to experiment a lot in making these creatures as varied as possible .
Of course, not all of the mercenaries look like cool monsters out of Warhammer or something. Some are just straight-up Misshapen Fiends, looking more like someone tried to sculpt an embryo out of clay, and glued on a bunch of malformed wings to it. That face is really a great mixture of wretchedness and malice, and the flavour text is perfect for what's otherwise a simple small 1/1 critter with flying.
I guess the Cateran Slaver doesn't just enslave humans? Equal-opportunity enslavement is a thing, I guess, because the Enslaved Horror is a card, and apparently they enslave their horror buddies. Enslaved Horror isn't the most interesting thing, though, looking more like an ogre or orc of some kind instead of a proper 'horror'. Somehow, when you summon this thing, both players also resurrect something from their graveyards? Like whatever is rising out from the mausoleum in the background? Okay, then.
Apparently the mercenaries aren't exclusively horrors either, because we've got the Rampart Crawler, who the M:TG Gatherer site tells me is a "Lizard Mercenary". I absolutely love the fantasy of this lizard-man assassin just slowly undulating and extending its body out of a crevice in the wall to assassinate some fancy-looking ruler. And, from the looks of it, the Crawler seems to be pretty dang happy to gulp down the dude's head after dealing the deed. Extremely flavourful effect, too. Cards are memorable best to me if the effects actually fit the fantasy of the card, y'know?
Primeval Shambler is one that I missed on my first draft of this article, and it's another horror mercenary, and if its flavour text is accurate, apparently this humanoid creature is made entirely out of a swamp's flotsam. I do really like the look of this hideous creature, from the exposed ribcage to the branches jutting out of its hunchback, but that face with the dead, bulbous eyes is easily the most striking part of this swamp creature.
It's not all horrors for the black cards in Mercadian Masques, though, because we have one of the grossest-looking enchantments that I've ever seen, and it's glorious. Maggot Therapy! And while real-life maggot debridement is a sort of a quaint, if off-putting, therapy that very few people do nowadays, apparently in Mercadia the maggots don't just eat dead flesh off of a wound, but rather surround that barbarian's two arms with writhing green maggots. Orim in the flavour text asks the question every one of us is asking -- what sort of disease warrants a cure of enough maggots that it'll give you +2/+2 in stats? 2/2 is basically the entire statline of the Cateran Brute! What sort of disease would cause someone to willingly have a giant horror's worth of maggots slapped onto them?
'Spirit' is sort of a creature type that gets thrown around wily-nily and it's not until Kamigawa where we get a whole ton of them, but even then I do like the ethereal look that many of these early spirit monsters have -- they have their own vibe of being... natural, in a sense. Obviously not quite like any man or beast, but there's just something about the Nether Spirit that makes it look like it's kind of part of the natural world, and the very ephemeral, cryptic flavour text does wonders at making it even more mysterious. I like the talons and the layer of hair (or lichen?) growing on it, but most creepily haunting is the eyeless, elongated cranium that has a small beak.
Okay, what is that thing that's doing the Soul Channeling? The expression on the helpless mook is funny, but that eerie pupil-less eyes on a head that's too low and placed on the hooded figure's torso is pretty dang creepy. I'm not sure if it's the dark overseer in the flavour text, or if it's the 'masters more terrible' that the overseers are afraid of.
...so that's what a Wumpus looks like? Okay, so it's some sort of huge fanged furry creature with... what are those blue, slug-like things all over it? I'm not sure what this thing is, but it sure is a beast that's thrashing around. The Thrashing Wumpus is apparently the young, juvenile form of the creature, and we'll meet the adult form later on, but it's pretty interesting to see a straight-up reference to a different IP. Not particularly sure why this one is a black creature, though.
Deathgazer is a pretty simple creature, just a nasty-looking lizard monster with a couple of extra fangs and horns, but it's enough to look monstrous enough. The scale of this creature isn't quite clear either, so I'm not sure if the Deathgazer is just a small lizard-toad, or if it's dinosaur-sized. I think that's a regular frog's feet jutting out of the Deathgazer's mouth. In any case, its eponymous effect is sort of like a basilisk or something, killing any who dares meet its gaze.
Lampreys are famous in monster design for having very, very creepy fanged suction-mouths, but Quagmire Lamprey takes things a whole lot further by being extra monstrous. I'm not sure what is more terrifying -- the rows of razor-sharp teeth that is certainly much, much more numerous than a regular lamprey, or the mass of pulsating white flesh around the mouth. Or maybe it's that green, vile bile that the lamprey is spewing all over its prey, doubtless the source of the -1/-1 debuff. Nasty. I really do like that we have these two just slightly monstrous animals that do have the black mana vibe to them, though, showing that the black colour is very versatile and doesn't just need to be demons and zombies and horrors.
So this set has a new creature type called a 'Monger', and unlike, say, 'Mercenary', Monger is more of... it's more of an odd word? It's more of a suffix than anything. Like, fishmonger or warmonger or stuff like that, y'know? Sort of like how fantasy works always love to slap '-mancer' on anything? And by that standard, I suppose anything could be a 'monger', like Scandalmonger. Presumably the Scandalmonger is some sort of Varys or Shadow Broker style figure in Mercadia, someone who knows all the gossips and uses them to blackmail. And I absolutely love that he's a huge red-skinned boar-person.
I've not really been super-keen on walls in the past couple of expansions, but Wall of Distortion is awesome! Looking like basically just a normal granite wall with runes or whatever, apparently it distorts itself into a hideous reflection of whoever is looking at it, and the artwork is pretty great, showing that noblewoman being absolutely shocked, while her reflection is this putrid, misshapen monstrosity.
Cho-Manno, Revolutionary, is the spiritual zen-looking leader of the Cho-Arrim rebellion that's fighting against the evil, mercantile Mercadian lords. He sure is a spiritual looking person. Y'know, for all of the far more interesting non-legendary cards in these Magic: The Gathering sets, I really wonder why they picked the most bland of them as the actual main characters of the stories.
I like Inviolability's artwork a lot. Those are like the weird face-in-the-chest dudes in Soul Channeling's artwork, right? I love the cheeky look of that person's face, and I like the surprised way that the cloaked figure in the back is like "gosh, John, I can't believe that the rebel just did that!"
The rebels of Cho-Arrim worship some dragon god named Ramos, and a lot of the White cards are called Ramosian this or Ramosian that, but they're all just regular old normal White creatures, y'know? They do have the 'Rebel' creature type, but they're all stuff we've seen like a couple dozen times over in M:TG. Except for Ramosian Sky Marshal, who just looks simultaneously awesome and ridiculous, with that little flight-cloak that I really don't think can support the man's weight without the aid of some clear magic.
Thermal Glider rides a far more Physics-wise feasible flying machine, looking like something that the Wright brothers or someone would design. I guess that's how the Cho-Arrim rebels ended up overthrowing the Mercadians? With flying hang-glider machines and, uh, that weird cloak that the Sky Marshal uses? They're neat!
White's monger is the Wishmonger, but instead of being a genie like what you'd expect, it's a glorious unicorn bishop man. This is ridiculous, and I love it. Why don't you do more of this, White? Make more of your creatures memorable instead of revolving around the same six or seven tropes of 'soldier', 'priest', 'gryphon', 'unicorn', 'angel' and 'normal peasant doing heroic thing'.
See, this is a lot cooler! The Jhovall Queen is a Jhovall, which is a sort of giant monstrous cat-creature. It doesn't really hold a candle to any of the wackier Green or Black creatures, but see, White, you too can have interesting monster designs that still look heroic without looking repetitive, y'know? I do like that the Jhovall Queen's artwork is clearly a giant feline creature, but there's just enough different things in the Jhovall's facial features that it's not just a bigger tiger or a cat or something. Or maybe I'm just trying to look too much and find cards I like from the White mana cards.
Afterlife probably has one of my favourite card arts in the set, though. It could be just yet another repetitive "hey, it's a dead holy dude whose ghost is doing something paladin-y", but the fact that the ghost looks just as confused with that Broken-Draenei-looking motherfucker in the background is hilarious. Can you imagine the conversation? "Bloody flippin' 'ell, I'm a ghost!" "Holy fuck, there's a ghost!"
I think it's Clash of the Titans that popularized "Kraken" as not just being a giant octopus or squid, but just any sort of sufficiently large sea monster? Sometimes with arms and a giant fish-like fang? Well, the Tidal Kraken sure is a huge, four-armed humanoid creature with a monstrous fish-like head about to fuck up that town. It's got a pretty neat flavour text, too.
Speaking of kraken and kraken-like creatures, we have something that's a bit more traditional and yet not quite so in the Sand Squid. The artwork is most likely meant to depict a giant squid hiding in the sand and chomping down on a merfolk, but considering this is Magic: The Gathering, it's just as likely that it's a squid that lives in the sand in the beach and floats around like a Zelda enemy. The latter is a bit wackier, so I prefer that.
The Chambered Nautilus is also another cephalopod that's definitely eating some poor merfolk person, and, again, it's another one that's just a huger version of what it usually is. I don't think I've ever seen the nautilus ever depicted in any way that's remotely threatening, though, so this one is neat.
We're kind of on a run with weird marine animals that are just larger versions of themselves, huh? But we never ever see anemones really get the spotlight at all in any media, and the Glowing Anemone is yet another gigantic version of a regular sea creature, using its tentacles to wrap around a merfolk. Someone has something about merfolk being strangled by tentacles, huh. We also don't really ever see anemone actually floating around the water like a jellyfish, though.
Continuing on with our wacky aquatic creatures is the Saprazzan Breaker, which is some sort of hideous fish-man monster that's considered a 'beast' and not a 'merfolk'. I do like its neat B-movie monster vibe with is eeriely humanoid upper half, and I do ike the expression it's making. It doesn't even look like a fierce rampaging monster like the Tidal Kraken up above, it just looks mildly irritated in that expression that it's showing as it looks at the two humans.
Oh, hey, speaking of spirits, there's the Extravagant Spirit, which is this fun mixture of bird and man features. It's basically a bird with just the torso of a human fused into it, and I do really like the fact that its head looks so innocent, like some sort of pet bird. The artwork and flavour text seems to imply that it steals all sorts of riches from the people. I like the semi-transparent quality to the spirit's wings. Pretty cool spirit.
Misdirection has my vote for one of the funner looking artworks. There is no flavour text, so we don't know what anime-hair bird-mask dude is actually doing, but I think he's basically, uh, swapping the heads of the human in the background and the statue (rock person? merfolk?) in the foreground? Or maybe that's Trafalgar Law before he became a pirate.
The merfolk of Mercadia look cool! There aren't much of them, but they have a lot more random fish qualities and spiky fins to them. We have the Blockade Runner, who apparently helps people avoid kayak patrols, and we have one of the cooler-looking merfolk, the Darting Merfolk. It looks like some monstrous combination of human and lionfish, with a face that looks almost like some sort of painted porcelain mask. The pose with her chomping on a bone or coral blade is also pretty badass.
The Saprazzan Legate, meanwhile, is a badass merfolk fella who's riding a drake into battle. Somehow? How do merpeople even mount anything? Do they, like, wrap their fish tails around something? It feels kind of weird, but the artwork still makes it look badass nonetheless.
Cloud Sprite is a delightful artwork. She just looks so happy with her tiny dragonfly wings as she's hugging that scroll and flying above an island city. She's a very peaceful-looking design, I like her.
Red now, and, as usual, there are goblins in red. Arms Dealer isn't quite as funny as some past goblins, looking like a regular old smuggler in Mercadia... until you realize that this otherwise serious-looking goblin... is actually smuggling fish. Fish in a crate, fish on his belt, and somehow if you sacrifice a goblin, the Arms Dealer is able to use the fish (and a dead goblin comrade?) to deal damage. Which... sure!
Our good goblin friend Squee of the Weatherlight crew has became Squee, Goblin Nabob. Nabob is an actual term denoting a man who became rapidly wealthy in a foreign country, and apparently in Mercadia good ol' Squee was mistaken as part of Mercadia's Kyren upper class because he's a goblin. Those sure are some nice robes, Squee!
There's not a whole ton to say about the Mercadian goblins, though, other than the fact that they're serious now. Kyren Glider's flavour text basically describes them succinctly. They're smart and cowardly, so kind of the opposite of Dominarian's dumb-and-suicidal goblins. Look at that super-serious expression on Kyren Glider's face! Also, lots of hang-gliding in Mercadia, huh?
Of course, the goblins apparently have a Battle Squadron, which is a ship whose power equals to the amount of other critters you own. I do really like the design of the ship, it's... it's fantasy-steampunk? I suppose? There are those neat-looking sails on the sides of the ship, but the rest of it looks like some sort of futuristic ship out of Star Wars that is modeled after a crustacean or something. Pretty cool, and it's neat to see the goblins be treated as more than the butt of a joke.
Anything can be an elemental in Magic: The Gathering, and Cinder Elemental is a pretty cool one. Most modern depictions of elementals tended to go for the genie-esque humanoid form, but the Cinder Elemental's thin, snake-like tapering neck and increasingly large body as it spins around like a tornado towards the ground is a really interestingly refreshing visual, and I do really like the gangly arms as well.
There's no real reason why Lava Runner is here. The red-and-white colouration is just super-duper pleasing to see, and I really like just how pleasant this lava-running lizard is. I just really like this artwork.
I'm not super-duper familiar with badgers, but I'm pretty sure Rock Badgers don't look like that, with a giant beak for an upper jaw and two orc fangs jutting out of the bottom one. I mean, this isn't an Earthen badger, it's a Mercadian badger, and in the plane of Mercadia, badgers are giant earth-boring creatures similar to D&D Purple Worms that the goblins just sort of utilize the tunnels of.
Likewise, Lightning Hounds don't look like any hounds I've ever seen, other than a very vague lupine body. And I suppose the one on the background does look like a gangly wolf that just happens to unleash lightning bolts when it's running... but the expression of the face in the foreground is a really nasty one, like it's some sort of combination of lupine and human features. It almost looks like it's got a sinister 80's Disney movie villain beard, which makes it look extra-evil. Apparently, these lightning hounds compete with the Jhovalls for prey and have a lion/hyena dynamic with them. That is awesome; I always like it when M:TG connects a couple of creatures that could've been easily be one-off monsters and make them the greater sum of a whole.
So, yeah, Jhovalls do have six legs. And are pretty big! And not all of them are domesticated. Wild Jhovall is a pretty cool artwork, and it does look a whole lot more cat-like than the mounted Jhovall knight person in White above. I'm not sure why I like the Jhovalls so much; I guess I like it when a M:TG plane's ecosystem has unique creatures or something.
Hey, it's a Two-Headed Dragon! Honestly, the trope isn't a terribly uncommon one, but adding extra heads to a dragon is always a cheap way to make it cool, and it always succeeds. Sam Wood gives us a particularly feral-looking beast, too, the heads look very imposing and the sight of it just breathing flames while those silly people are scrambling for cover is pretty awesome. I dunno, sometimes I really appreciate the artwork!
Red gets a bunch of insects, and if you know anything about me, I love bugs as monsters. Robber Fly isn't the most impressive insect, though, and judging by the size, it's the sort of bug that you'll believe exists in real life. I don't think any fly has those earwig-esque pincer-butt appendages, and I'm not quite sure just what the Robber Fly is doing. Is it stinging the poor dude's eye? The effect of the Robber Fly is that whenever it's blocked, your enemy has to discard and redraw their hands. What, does the Robber Fly stab your enemy in the face and make them drop their spells and scrabble to get new ones or something?
Anyway, the Robber Fly's kinda boring, but certainly not any of these two insects! The Cavern Crawler looks all sorts of nasty with those shoulder/thorax protrusion-horn things, and its front legs look extremely bizarre. It's jointed like an insect's legs, but the end looks like... it almost reminds me of a squid's tentacle? And of course there's the always nasty-looking over-detailed bug face with those two massive eyes, and judging by the artwork the Cavern Crawler is bursting out of a tunnel wall or a mountainside and is surprising a poor goblin.
"Litho-" is a prefix in Latin meaning stone or rock, and "-phage" means to eat or consume. So on first glance I took a look at the Lithophage and nodded. Neat, a weird centipede-thing with gangly legs and a nasty fly-like suction-mouth that eats rocks. It liquefies the rocks and then drinks it up, like many real-life arthropods, most famously spiders. And then I take a closer look at the card. Wait, a 7/7 insect? And... and is that a mountain in the background? And you have to sacrifice a mountain every turn as upkeep for your Lithophage? ...oh, shit, the flavour text confirms everything, because the Lithophage is a straight-up mountain-eating giant centipede. Every single turn, you have to allow it to consume one of the mountains you control, otherwise it dies (presumably of hunger). That is awesome. Sorry, Delraich, you just got ousted from your spot as my favourite monster in this set. I absolutely love how goofy-looking the Lithophage looks.
Let's continue the streak of insects as we head into Green, and Green's first deadly insect is Deadly Insect, which we last saw with a far more stylized artwork in Alliances. And while I do prefer that far more unique-looking spindle-bug, Mercadia's Deadly Insect is still pretty cool, some sort of mantis-ant monster that's large enough to dine on some random human. I do like that both insects sort of fit the 6/1 stat line, with Alliances's more sinister looking Deadly Insect being small but extremely poisonous, whereas Mercadia's Deadly Insect is a straight-up terrifying-but-fragile giant bug.
The idea of Caustic Wasps makes me really shudder. While I am a huge lover of insects, I am terrified of wasps after a mishap as a kid, and the idea that these wasps are actually so caustic that they're capable of melting the stone bust of Posh McPosh over there? The wasps are a very creepy shade of green, too. Ick!
Saber Ants is another pretty straightforward insect monster, just a huge insect that attacks with its massive jaws. I do really like the artwork of it snapping off the sword of some poor squire while its smaller comrades watch in earnest anticipation, and I really like the flavour text.
Another one that we've seen before, we last saw Giant Caterpillar in Visions, with artwork of him hugging a giant house. This one doesn't quite show us that whimsical sense of scale, but boy oh boy does that close-up to the Giant Caterpillar's NASTY multi-pronged maw of doomy-doom-doom is awesome. And honestly, while this Giant Caterpillar's eyes are a lot creepier being little red dots that are sunken against the undulations of white flesh, it's not like the faces of real-life caterpillars are any less pleasant.
Okay, enough bug-geeking for a day. Let's go into Ancestral Mask, which has another one of my favourite art pieces from the set. It's some dryad lady who's put on a mask, and I really love that the mask is making the dryad lady gesticulate and contort in a happy dance. Is it the dryad dancing in joy herself, or is the mask controlling her? I really do like that it's less of a regular carved wooden mask, but looks more like something made out of light itself. Pretty cool imagery.
The Megatherium is a real-life animal, a prehistoric giant sloth the size of an elephant. But Mercadia's Megatherium is an insane-looking beast with thorns jutting out of its muscles, locks of flowing hair, and that face! That face looks less like an animal and more like some sort of plant-based monster or something, y'know? Like the barks of a wooden tree is converging together into a gaping, yawning mouth? Pretty cool monster.
Green has a lot of wacky one-off monsters here, with the Erithizon, one letter off from Erethizon, the genus name of the common North American porcupine. Someone in the Mercadian Masques development team is a huge biology geek, and I approve! The Erithizon is some sort of hideous troll-creature with a pretty cool-looking face, and it's a porcupine-troll-man. I really like the idea that the Erithizon's spines are basically self-sabotaging. Any time it attacks, apparently its prey gets the chance to pluck off one of its spines and use it (in the form of a +1/+1 counter your opponent gets to use) against the huge porcupine fool.
Okay, so that's what a Hunted Wumpus looks like? No wonder they want to hunt the Wumpus. It's... I'm not sure what it is, to be honest, even though this one shows a better look of the Wumpus than the Black-mana one. It's got the body of some sort of rhinoceros or an elephant, but instead of a regular Tethytherian head, it's got a massive mass of fur for a head that ends in a giant fang-filled maw that looks like one of those Star Wars monsters back when they still used puppets. It's a pretty cool, wacky beast.
Pangosaur is a bit more obvious, it's a dinosaur with the shell of a pangolin. It's a very cool looking beast, with a shovel-esque set of fangs, seemingly no eyes, chunky legs and a very dynamic pose of it using its massive tail to lash around and rip off trees. I'm not sure what it means, though, when it jumps back to the player's hand when a land is played.
The Snorting Gahr is kind of like a rhinoceros, but with extra horns. It's a neat-looking beast, and it also almost looks like a dinosaur, kind of, with that beak mouth.
I have no idea what a "Tantiv" is, and I don't think it ever shows up ever again in M:TG, but it sure is a strange creature. Some sort of bizarre squad ungulate with the feet of a deer, the head of a squad dragon, these bizarre antlers that look more like the wings of a mutated dragon, whatever those white tusks are meant to be, a bizrare white hump... whatever the Deepwood Tantiv is, it sure is a bizarre-looking beast for sure!
The elementals are pretty cool, too! Green always had very cool elementals. Rushwood Elemental might seem like a cool-looking but unremarkable forest elemental, a plant-man of some sort... but it's got a very cool face with glowing eyes, and, best of all, look very closely at those yellow caverns in the foreground. That's not just forest detritus, those are apparently caverns that people can fit in, and there's a human there. The Rushwood Elemental is huge, far larger than the 4/4 stat block might lead you to believe.
Meanwhile, while the Rushwood Elemental looks menacing, the Silverglade Elemental just looks eerie, like something out of a folktale book or something of an ancient nature god. Those arms with spindly limbs, the way the torso tapers off into what seems to be a tree bark, and that old man face that's neither kind nor threatening... I really like this one. Too bad neither elementals have any flavour text to speak of.
Trolls in M:TG tend to go for the huge, pot-bellied humanoid route, and the Horned Troll is a very strange-looking one. It looks more like a bizarre baboon of sorts, albeit with a longer, stockier body and a bunch of horns and green fur... but the flavour text even pokes fun at it. Apparently it's our good old buddy Squee that has classified the Horned Troll as a 'troll', because goblins are always right in Mercadia. Okay, Squee, whatever you say.
Spontaneous Generation brings back the Saprolings from, uh... Fallen Empires, I think the expansion that starred them was in? Apparently they don't just spawn from Thallids now, and now they're less weird plant-critters and look more like huge lamprey Tremors-esque worm monsters. I know that Saprolings basically became an evergreen token for Green, so I guess they just proliferated into other planes? Or do Saprolings just independently evolve in different planes or something? Or is it just a term like 'bug' that people use as a catch-all term for any sort of ambulatory plant monster with a vaguely 1/1 power level?
Food Chain has got a pretty cool artwork, showing a bunch of fat, disgusting maggots burrowing otu of some dude's grave. Man, that's nasty looking. Really wished this one came with a suitable flavour text, too.
Based on what M:TG Wiki tells me, the Henge Guardian is actually the true form of the god Ramos that some Mercadians worship, and it's not just a metal dragon, it's actually a Thran relic that has found its way to Mercadia and the sheer power of the Thran engineering kept it operating or something. It's a pretty cool visual, with the Henge Guardian's anatomy not quite fitting with a typical dragon's, particularly the hind legs. The backdrop of desert sand and the way that those wings are jointed into the Henge Guardian's body is also pretty neat. I'm not sure why this one isn't legendary, though, you'd think at this point they have enough coordination between the story and card design team, y'know?
I like the idea behind Toymaker, it's a bunch of goblin hobnobs in the bacgkround talking while a robot is making another robot. It's also a Spellshaper for some reason, and I'm not sure what that entails. It's a very pleasnt-looking design, in any case.
Puffer Extract is very funny. Apparently they're weaponizing the toxins that proper fugu chefs know to avoid, except apparently Mercadian pufferfish extract also acts as a fatal steroid. Mostly it's here for the sheer hilarity of that extremely worried-looking pufferfish in the background. "Oh no, poor uncle Jim!"
Oh, right, Mercadia's meant to be a mercantile plane. With all the giant insects and cool jungle beasts and merfolk, I genuinely forgot what the theme of Mercadia is meant to be! Anyway, I guess it's appropriate to close this off with the artifact Credit Voucher, which just seems appropriate for a set like this. I like the artwork, in any case.
And here are the rest of the cards that I don't quite have as much to say about. And I really don't have a whole ton to say about a lot of them.
To be fair, there are a bunch of cards like Alley Grifters, Corrupt Official, Highway Robber and Bog Smugglers that sort of hint more towards a huge city with lots of trade and lots of thieves and smugglers and whatnot, but they're not quite as interesting? Bog Smugglers has a delightful-looking swamp vehicle, though.
Oh, hey, apparently the Caterans don't just employ horrors and lizardmen, Strongarm Thug, Cateran Kidnappers and Cateran Persuader appear to be humans. I think that's the slave cage that the Cateran Slaver pulls in his artwork, too!
Instigator and Notorious Assassin are both classified 'Spellshaper', and... I'm not sure what that means? I think it's something we've just only seen in this set? Does he shape spells with that crossbow? Is she 'spellshaping' with that dagger? I'm not sure what shaping spells even is. Molting Harpy has a nasty looking artwork.
I missed that Skulking Fugitive was a mercenary. he is a horror, presumably, and I like that he kinda looks like an oni, and his expression towards being caught is more of an 'oopsie daisy!'
I really like how the Deepwood Ghoul has latched on to some huge beast and is hanging on for dear life. He probably thought he just ambushed a poor peasant or something, but, nope, he got some sort of Jhovall or something. Poor Deepwood Ghoul, he just wants to eat.
Oh, hey, it's Cateran Enforcer on Extortion's card art! And also in Larceny! Still with his sinister insect-mandible-mustache, going around knocking and asking for extortion money. He is a man committed to his job.
I don't want to know what those goblins are doing in Conspiracy. It apparently leads to some Pretender's Claim, which... I guess is explained in the novel or something.
Midnight Ritual is pretty dang creepy. And, hey, that's Cateran Enforcer again in the artwork for Intimidation! Man really gets around.
I don't quite care to look into every card art and make an exhaustive list, but the crew of the Weatherlight show up in a bunch of them like Haunted Crossroads and Specter's Wail.
Yeah, eat that shield, Unnatural Hunger person! Also, more Spellshapers, I still genuinely have no idea what they are.
A bunch of Cho-Arrim rebel folk. I do like the Cho-Arrim Bruiser, he's literally a rebel without a cause. Also, hey, another Jhovall Rider. This one doesn't seem to have six legs, but the back half of the beast is ambiguous enough.
A bunch of soldiers and rebels! With a cause! Alabaster Wall is literally just a wall. It's not even enchanted or half-alive or an illusion or blessed by the heavens or anything!
Even more rebels. The artwork's all neat, particularly Pious Warrior, but man I just don't have anything to say here. They are priest-warrior-rebel people. That's like, every single card.
Rebel! Without a cause!
Okay, the Charmed Griffin is actually pretty cool, raining a storm of feathers down on a six-legged wolf-cat-creature. I do like the dynamic pose. I think that's meant to be a Jhovall, and so Jhovalls are six-legged giant cats? That's cool. Tome Peddler's also a pretty cool creature that fits with the whole 'merchant city' deal.
So the Wave of Reckoning is, like, snow or something? What is this, Ice Age?
Of course the rebels fight against the goblins. Of course the goblins got to be the villains. Righteous Indignation indeed, these damn humans, they keep thinking they're in the right all the time, have they not seen how goblins are treated in other planes? Let them have this one, you dumb He-Man-looking human!
Oh, hey, a bunch of story-related flavour text in Arrest, Soothing Balm and Renounce.
Cornered Market is a pun. I appreciate it, and I do appreciate the cards that try their best to do the whole market-city vibe, even if I think the theme in and of itself might not be enough for 300+ cards.
What makes the Ivory Mask an enchantment and not an artifact? Sometimes it's just nitpicking, but sometimes there's a literal item being held by a person in the art and it's like, okay, why are you not an artifact?
Moonlit Wake is a very pretty artwork. I like it.
Orim's Cure is an interesting artwork. The red mask guy in the background is like "Imma amputate his wounded leg" and Orim is like "get out of here with your homeopathic medicine!"
Balloon Peddler has such a delightful name. I also really like the artworks for Chameleon Spirit and Rishadan Footpad.
Waterfront Bouncer is around 85% muscle by mass. Look at him. He's got approximately three times the amount of deltoid muscles that a normal person has. That sure is a very effective bouncer! I'm not sure what a "Sailmonger" is. The name implies that she sells, like, sails for ships or something, but the artwork has her conjure a bunch of like, illusory birds or something.
Rishadan Brigand and Aerial Caravan are neat dudes riding giant birds. I do like the flavour text for the latter. Sure, you could send your goods by giant albatross instead of a regular old ship, but if the delivery isn't successful, why did you ever think a giant albatross would guarantee the safety of your caravan? I think I mostly included Aerial Caravan here because it's one of the couple of interesting cards that also plays into the whole 'mercantile-driven city' part of Mercadia, which doesn't quite necessarily gets communicated that well, I feel.
More merfolk! These are all actually pretty cool artwork, particularly Saprazzan Raider, but they're all ultimately just merfolk, y'know?
Stinging Barrier is pretty cool and thematic with the merfolk and stuff, it's like, a full on wall of stinging corals that blocks waterways. I'm not sure what the blue-skinned humanoids in some of these cards are. Are they merfolk? Genies? Vedalken?
Oh, so that's what it is! Bouyancy's flavour text tells us that apparently Mercadian merfolk are the sort that sprout legs when they exit the water. So that's how the Saprazzan dragon-rider dude up above rides his mount. Neat! This one dude just doesn't give a shit, though, he just levitates a giant ball of water and fights people on land with his trident.
Ah, the power of the charismatic protagonist being inserted into a setting is displayed in Charisma and Cowardice.
Karn just looks so done in the artwork of Energy Flux. I like to imagine that he just doesn't give a shit as he does the thing descrcibed in the flavour text, doing everything with a deadpan expression.
I don't have a lot of things to say, but all of these have very fun artwork. I particularly like the little pieces of debris in the sky in Gush's artwork.
Karn's Touch apparently brings objects to life, turning artifacts into artifact creatures. Now while the artwork is pretty cool, bringing a metal bird to life, or like bringing like swords or gemstones into sentient objects... theoretically, Karn's Touch can bring Urza's Glasses into life and fight for you as a monster. Misstep and Squeeze both have very fun artwork. See, I spend so much time talking even about the 'unremarkable' cards in Blue, when I basically blazed through White in like under three minutes.
Poor Timid Drake, it's just so afraid of anything that's not a cloud! Poor baby. Statecraft has a very fun flavour text, too.
And we go to red, now. Blood Hound is a regular, boring old real-life wolf. Nowhere a interesting as those Lightning Hounds. That dude on the center of the artwork in Ceremonial Guard has a very creepy grinning mask. (And also, the flavour text is fun.)
A bunch of 'flailing' cards for Red here, none of which I feel are particularly noteworthy, but it's always neat to see a set play around with a cycle of mechanics. Is it a cycle if all the cards are in a single colour? My terminology for card games is not very good.
A bunch more spellshapers, and I absolutely love the teeny-tiny hammers that the Hammer Mage has. Kris Mage holds a particularly large kris/keris, an Indonesian/Malaysian dagger. Warmonger has got a little bull head on his scepter, he's a fun minotaur man.
For a plane that's supposedly got a high ranking group of competent goblins that are respected in Mercadia City, we had, like, what, a grand total of six, maybe seven cards? It's nice to see these Kyren goblins look cool and competent, though. Apparently Kyren goblins really love blowdarts.
A bunch of brutes and a wall. Not much to say here. Stone Rain is a pretty cool image, too, I don't think I've ever actually seen a 'stone rain' in any fantasy setting.
A bunch of red cards. I haven't mentioned it a whole ton, but Red and White does the bulk of showing the Mercadian soldiers trained by Gerrard fighting the Cho-Arrim rebels.
Karn's deadpan "why" face just looks so tired and I absolutely love that he's randomly in the background of a card like Brawl.
A lot of explody-splody things.
A bunch of ships fighting each other in an underground hangar. Y'know, I take it back, there actually is a decent amount of cards telling the story of Mercadian Masques, it's just that I'm just a wee bit too tired to try and arrange them.
Haha, I love that Pulverize's artwork is just a giant pink elephant stomping on things.
A bunch of nature-based red spells with destructive stuff. I particularly love the artwork for Thunderclap. It looks like such an epic effect for a mere 3 damage.
A bunch of fun animals, but we sort of already seen creatures like these before. Venomous Dragonfly is neat, though, I don't think those exist in real life. None that can kill with a single sting, in any case.
Deepwood Drummer looks so happy to be drumming. He's probably screaming some metal beats. I misread "Sacred Prey" as "Scared Prey" and thought that the horse didn't look particularly scared.
The Lumbering Satyr is hardly the satyr of Grecian legend, though, and looks more like a mutant kaiju or something. I don't have much to say about a lot of the 'just a Green druid' cards, but Rushwood Legate and Deepwood Elder both have very pretty card art.
We've got a couple of new dryads, but they're just kind of there, y'know? There's nothing that's particularly different from the many nature-manipulating elves that we've gotten before.
I am not sure what's going on with those creatures in Bifurcate. Are they being split apart? Or being fused together? Is this like some sort of weird budding-style reproduction? The fact that these things look like naked mole rats makes the artwork even more bizarre.
Oh hey, it's a Wumpus in Clear the Land. And Game Preserve! They look very neat.
More green spells. I don't know, I just find them neat, but I can't really say much about them.
More Green spells. A bunch of nature-animal stuff. There's another Wumpus.
Venomous Breath has a pretty cool artwork, I like it.
Speaking of cool artwork, Snake Pit and Spidersilk Armor both are pretty dynamic pieces of art, I like them.
And here we go into the artifacts. Unless I'm missing something, there isn't much here I really want to talk about.
So buildings are also considered artifacts now? Eh. If you say so.
Oh, hey, it's poor Squee, hiding in a Crumbling Sanctuary! You can also use his robes and hand it over to a Wumpus or the Lithophage or something.
We get a cycle of random gemstones revolving around Ramos. As usual, I don't care for any of these colourful gemstones as artifacts.
I didn't know "Torque" could mean necklace until googling it in response to Jeweled Torque.
Distorting Lens! But is it as mighty as Urza's glasses? I like the poetic flavour text that fits with Mercadia's vibe.
A bunch of locations in Mercadia. A lot of them are pretty obvious, though. Tower of the Magistrate basically plays to the trope of a caste-driven city, you've got the obligatory Green location, and Subterranean Hangar is mentioned a couple of times in other cards.
Dust Bowl is a neat artwork, looks more like a spell card than a land card. Henge of Ramos is very prismatic-looking, pretty majestic, like some sort of huge event is happening. Probably involving Ramos the Thran machine god thing.
High Market and Mercadian Bazaar are very busy city esque. I like the artwork for Remote Farm, it's very atmospheric and melancholic.
We've got a bunch more lands. Don't have much to say here.
Basic lands now. I think the one on the most right is meant to show Mercadia City itself? It's like a wierd upside-down pyramid or something, s'cool.
Nothing to say here for islands...
...or the swamps
...or the mountains...
...or the forests. I do like the second artwork for this, those are some weird looking trees.
Next up is Nemesis, and hopefully I can work through these smaller sets a bit faster!
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