One Piece 1145 Review: You Can Stop Forest Fires

One Piece, Chapter 1145: The Blaze in Branch 8 Forest, No. 2

The chapter starts off with a group of people taking down a giant beast -- just not any of the ones we expected from last chapter. It's Goldberg, Sanji and Zoro taking out a giant brachiosaur-type dinosaur, with a seldom-seen "armée de l'air" combo move between Sanji and Zoro. Sanji launches Zoro towards the dinosaur, and Zoro beheads the poor beastie. Oh, and before that, Goldberg's sentient shield expands into a massive size to block the dinosaur's charge. 

A lot of people have pointed out that Goldberg's shield has a weird Homie-esque face all the way back since when these giants appeared on cover stories, and we get the confirmation for this minor character's weird shield. Goldberg notes that the shield, Nash, was transformed after his dad clashed with Big Mom a while back. It does confirm that Nash is a Homie, but it also raises some questions -- why is Nash not aligned with Big Mom anymore? He also recognizes who Zeus is (and is surprised that Zeus is the Straw Hats' lackey now). I'm not sure if we'll have any time for the story to really devote itself to expanding on this at all, or if it's just a handwave so Goldberg can start showing off his power in action scenes later on. 

Meanwhile, Loki is still chained up on the grounds and tells Luffy, Hajrudin and the others about the God's Knights that maimed him. Loki doesn't go into too much depth about how powerful the God's Knights are, but he does explain the basic concept of them being super-high-ranking government knights. 

We get a bit of a running gag of Luffy wanting to help Loki get better, but constantly accidentally harming him even more -- whether it's by dropping a piping-hot chunk of meat or an entire mug of hot soup on poor Loki. It's a bit of a black comedy, but I do find it funny that Gerd, the doctor, is even giving Luffy thumbs-ups for hurting Loki. It's a nice bit of storytelling from One Piece here since the gag itself is some nice slapstick, but it also really adds to the utterly horrid reputation that Loki has among the giants. 

We don't quite get a full backstory for Loki just yet, but Loki still claims that he knows of Shanks' whereabouts. This leads to Loki noting that having a pirate to look up to is a feeling he knows very well as we cut to a period of time in the past when a little young boy Loki charges into a tavern and demands that a well-known pirate take him as a crew. Many children all over the world have done this -- to Luffy, to Roger, to Shanks... and it's a familiar sight in this series. Except Loki's idol is... ROCKS D. XEBEC! Making yet another appearance while silhouetted. I think this is his first speaking appearance? Xebec is no Shanks, though, beating and stabbing Kid Loki before walking off, much to the disgust of Whitebeard, who was with him at the time. Interestingly, present-day Loki mutters something along the lines of "I was born in the wrong era", the same kind of language used by Roger when he found the One Piece. 

No real explanation for that, though, as the next sequence of scenes shows Dorry, Brogy and Scopper beating the shit out of the nightmare giants. Interestingly, the Draugr seem to have multiplied... are there just multiple kids imagining Draugrs, or can Killingham summon more nightmare monsters from the same nightmare? Or is the undying-ness just part of the Draugr's abilities? Scopper Gaban beats up the fake Loki, and makes a comment about how this isn't anywhere close to the real Loki and is inaccurate thanks to the kids' imagination... but also is solemn as he notes that we're reaching the endgame now that even Elbaf is no longer safe.

Saul has also beaten Fenrir offscreen, which I really would've liked to see even if it's in a panel. (Or, y'know, let Robin or Chopper do something, y'know?) The firemen on flying boats are trying to put out the fire as the children walk into them, but it's ineffective... until a moving, serpentine mass of water comes and douses off the fire. Saul and the other giants praise the very confused firefighters for doing it, but it's actually Jinbe's Ocean Current Shoulder Throw. 

I didn't realize that Jinbe is doing it secretly so as not to upset the giants, but it does kind of make a fair bit of sense. Robin and Chopper realize what's going on, though, and we get a nice little moment where Colon tells the Straw Hats that while he doesn't get along well with the other kids, they are still his friends. That's cute. 

But then as this little victory is over, we see Gunko, standing menacingly with her arrow swirling around her, ready for a confrontation with the kid that isn't at school. That's a very fun little setup for the confrontation between the God's Knights and the Straw Hats, and while I am excited with the prospect of seeing the God's Knights show off what they can do in direct combat... Brook is also there on Colon's boat. I do really want to see Gunko's reaction to Brook more than anything, since we've established last chapter that she's a Soul King fan. 

Random Notes:

• Yamato's Pilgrimage Cover Story: Ulti finds that Pay-tan is still alive. Notably, Yamato in the background is looking away. The Ulti and Page One for Grand Fleet agenda is still strong! 
• The 'Groggysaurus' or whatever is yet another animal design taken from the artwork of One Piece: Strong World. Again, to remind everyone that Loki's giant animal friends are all creatures from Strong World. 
• A nice little detail is that Goldberg is the New Giant Pirates' chef, which is why he's so quick at suggesting cooking recipes for the Groggysaurus. 
• Of course Whitebeard, who has a huge desire to be a dad, takes massive umbrage with Rocks leaving a child near-death. 

One Piece 1144 Review: Billboard No. #1

One Piece, Chapter 1144: A Time For Warriors

Slightly late for this review, apologies -- I'm traveling around a bit and it does make it hard to make up-to-date content, which also explains the delay of Daredevil: Born Again reviews. But most of this chapter is just fun 'beating up weaklings' setup, which I did really enjoy reading but it doesn't really make for a particularly heavy review chapter... at least until I noticed some stuff that let me talk a bit more -- which makes me glad that I delayed this review a bit, actually. 

The opening scenes are another 'revelation', with Ripley showing Franky a particularly modern-looking building that's overgrown with plants. Some people describe it as a "robot-esque" building, though it could just be windows. Bonney and Lilith are also there, apparently having gotten lost off-screen. It's just some Ancient Kingdom technology shenanigans, or even technology way beyond it. The trope of the fantasy world actually being a post-apocalyptic remnants of a super-technologically-advanced world is one that's quite common in fantasy and one that I wouldn't be surprised is a 'big twist' we get later on, so I wasn't particularly surprised we get another foreshadowing here -- I just am waiting for what the connection to that epic mural is going to be. 

Franky and Ripley, however, are assaulted by one of the MMAs, or Sleeptids, depending on the translation -- a giant lightning-storm. I like that Franky initially goes "oh, Elbaph is truly a land of wonder" while Ripley freaks out and yells that this isn't Elbaph's regular fantasy elements. To be fair to Franky, though, the Straw Hats do travel with Zeus, who is a smaller version of this giant lightning monster. 

The giant burning skeleton, the Draugr, is stomping around. I like a brief foreshadowing of Dorry and Brogy being too drunk and MIA, and I absolutely love that Brook makes a brief gag about how he mistakes the Draugr as a giant version of him. The giants tell the Straw Hats, being guests, to stand back -- and Usopp tries to whisper-offer that they can fight too. Again, it's a running gag, but please let Usopp do something huge in this arc. Nami brings Jarul up offscreen about the existence of an evil Shanks-doppelganger, which is a nicely convenient way to avoid a "what, Shanks is evil?" plot for now. 

After some exposition and recap, Team Nami still gets told to sit down and wait it out because of hospitality. They end up hitching a ride on Colon, who's very much willing to be a stupid dumb kid riding into battle on his little boat (which is just a regular boat for the humans). He's very happy to be on a great viking adventure, while the Straw Hats are humouring him by playing along with his kid games.

The most interesting scene to me is the continuation of the Gods' Knights' lunch. We see Gunko listening to music on a pair of earphones. Killingham and Sommers discuss this, noting it as Gunko's "post-meal ritual". Sommers immediately goes into some dipshit territory, and the writer really wants us to hate him -- he notes that he prefers a live musical performance... just so he can shoot whoever misses a note. Gunko, meanwhile, tells the other two that the song she is listening to is called "New World"...

And I completely missed it the first time I read this, but "New World" is one of the songs that Brook sang in his career as the Soul King! We also establish via Brook's time-skip that tone-dial earphones to sell music is a technology that was developed and marketed during the time-skip. Having Brook be a potential important player in Elbaf is nowhere close in my bingo card, but he's probably one of my favourite Straw Hats and having a potentially huge moment for him is definitely very interesting!

The scene concludes with Sommers kind of mocking Gunko a bit, asking (albeit not in an aggressive way) if she's got a problem with the world they currently live in, to which Killingham tells him to knock off and not bully Gunko's hobbies. And I know that we have to take this all with the knowledge that these are ultra-racist Celestial Dragons that are currently planning to kidnap children with the intention of using them as hostages and not batting an eye if they burn alive... but Oda is really trying to give Killingham and especially Gunko nice qualities. 

Gunko, in particular, has had a lot of hints that she's originally not a Celestial Dragon. She doesn't have 'Saint' in her name, she's particularly offended at Loki for refusing the 'honour' of joining them, she was particularly excited about the high-quality salt last chapter... there's a lot of theories floating around Gunko and her potential origin stories (which range quite wildly) but I also kind of agree that she feels like one of those "evil but not too evil" kooky characters that might be a potential ally -- someone like Mr. 2, or Ulti, or Baby Five, or Hacchan... it's interesting. I do like that the Gods' Knights are not all one-dimensional asshats like Sommers or card-carrying villains like Shamrock, but I'm also not sure about having one of our first members be the one that potentially defects.

We cut away briefly to Saul using double-shields to stop the children and their thorn-vine auras, which fails miserably as the kids just pierce each other. It also confirms that they can't just whack the kids in their heads to wake them up. It is a bit silly that Robin and Chopper -- both with relatively versatile devil fruits -- have apparently been doing nothing but hang out in Saul's beard and offer the occasional commentary. At least Robin should be able to do something! Another MMA shows up, and it's Fenrir, so maybe the Straw Hats can fight. I wouldn't mind seeing Robin do something after sitting out last arc's combat bits. 

The giants have, off-screen, taken down the Draugr -- but it seems that some of the giants have fallen in the process. But even more monsters show up! Nidhoggr, a lightning dragon, and a giant blobby ghost start attacking... and then promptly get one-shot by a HAKOKU SOVEREIGNTY attack. It's like our third time seeing Hakoku and it's admittedly losing its luster a bit, but it's also very cool to see Dorry and Brogy show up and be badasses, showing that the giants aren't always just there to be cannon fodder. The two of them have been going around vomiting out the alcohol to sober up (which is not how you sober up from being wasted, but okay) and they even have Scopper Gaban with them! Which is nice. The giant monsters are nice fodders to keep these secondary characters busy while the Straw Hats can deal with the actual named villains!

Random Notes:

• Yamato Cover Story: Yamato and company recover the kidnapped people, who are actually kidnapped by Who's Who. Right, that sure is a hanging plot thread. I think most people aren't particularly invested in this, and want to know more about what Yamato's going to do with the dino siblings. 
  
• Typical 'author keeping the mystery from the audience' trope -- now that the audience knows Collun's dad is Scopper Gaban, he wastes no time announcing it every second sentence instead of yelling that 'my father is a pirate'. 
• The mystery building is 3000 years old, placing it way beyond the Void Century and within one of the earliest periods in the Harley Text.
• I actually like that the one that points out that Usopp is saying "let us help too" in a smaller volume is Jinbe, who looks genuinely surprised. Poor team dad, he doesn't know Usopp's running gags yet. 
• During the Jarul discussion, Jinbe quickly figures out that there are Devil Fruits at work here, and Brook also points out that there's likely to be more than two Devil Fruits at work with how weird things are. It's a nice bit of showcase that the older, more world-traveled members of the crew rightfully just handwave anything weird as 'Devil Fruit. Which is honestly a nice nod of the main source of weirdness in this world.
• I originally thought "New World" was just a wink-wink nod to One Piece: Film Red, where one of the insert songs by Uta (or real-world artist Ado) is a song with the English words "new world" in it. That song, however, was actually called "New Genesis"! 
• One of the prevailing theory is that Gunko is somehow connected -- or will be connected -- to the Revolutionaries, due to sharing their fashion sense of having a hat with goggles on it. 
• The ghost wears a cute little hat with horns. He just looks happy to be around. 
• The Giant Pirates' ship, the Great Eirik, can apparently fly around as a Svarr if properly modified. 

Reviewing Magic: The Gathering #5: The Dark

We don't have traditional 'blocks' as of yet, but even this early on Wizards has already segmented 'large expansions' and 'small expansions' pretty well. And coming off 'Legends' as we build up to the huge events of 'Ice Age', we have a couple of small expansions.

The Dark and the expansion that comes after it, Fallen Empires, bridges the gap between the storyline told in Antiquities. The huge magical war caused the sun to be blotted out by magical debris, and this plunges the world of Dominaria into a literal dark age. Hence, The Dark. 

Despite the rather cool premise, this 119-card expansion is probably one of the ones that feels the most non-cohesive and feels more like a gathering of cards that didn't make it into the larger sets of Alpha, Legends or Ice Age... the other early 'small sets' of Arabian Nights, Antiquities and Fallen Empires all had either a flavour or gameplay mechanic that holds them together. The Dark... doesn't. It's hard to be too mean considering that the designers of this game are still pretty much on a huge trial-and-error mode at this point, but it will become apparent if you sneak a peek into the card effects as a whole. 

In particular, The Dark is remembered among the MTG fandom for introducing a lot of 'colour pie' conflicts... certain colours have certain mechanics that they are good at, and certain things that they should have limited or no access to. The Dark flips this around in the head with some cards, which is quite detrimental to both game balance and game flavour. 

• Click here for the previous part.
• Click here for the next part.
• Click here for the index.

[Originally released as 'The Dark & Fallen Empires' in August 2019; rewritten in January-February 2025]

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We'll start off with a pretty fun artwork of the Bog Imp. The card itself is a 'French vanilla', which is to say a simple creature with a single keyword, in this case the Bog Imp is a 1/1 with Flying. But I really do like the artwork! A green humanoid with an elongated, Alien-esque skull and a fanged grin, and limbs that taper off into red. Or are they blood-stained? There's a pair of wings that are folded down, almost like they were plastic coverings or something? I like the almost peaceful scene here with the imp seemingly fishing. 

Rag Man is... interesting? "Aw, he's just a silly dirty little man" says the flavour text. And the idea is that he just seems like a pretty harmless -- if unkempt -- man... but that elongated arm with curled fingers are just a bit too long to look perfectly harmless. The effect has the Rag Man force your opponent to discard a card, which does fit with the imagination of this thing stealing something from you. The artwork almost implies that the Rag Man is secretly a vampire or a ghoul or some sinister creature of the dark, but the great creature type update retcons him into a 'Human Minion'. I think I preferred the version of the Rag Man that my imagination cooked up. 

Frankenstein's Monster is a fun little reference to the classic horror novel. I do appreciate that the card art isn't just copying the 'classic' feel of the 1931 movie, and instead opts for a grislier artwork. It's got a pretty flavourful (if weak) effect, where you exile cards from the graveyard and add a buff token of your choice to Frankenstein's Monster, simulating the effect of you 'using up' the bodies in the graveyard to attach extra buffs to Frank. 

An example of how mismatched the early sets are are things like this. After the previous expansion made such a big deal about the 'Legendary' cards representing creatures instead of a creature type, we get 'Uncle Istvan'. Who, since this isn't a legendary creature, leads us to assume that there are multiple crazy hermits called Uncle Istvan in this time period in Dominaria. Yep, yep.

Nameless Race should've been a boring card. The artwork is just two knockoff Prince Zukos posing. The effect has the X/X be tied to an amount of life that the caster pays. Kind of boring... except that as of the great creature type update, Nameless Race is, thanks to the name and the game designers having a nice sense of humour, the only creature cards without an actual creature type. 

For an expansion that's called 'The Dark', a lot of the Black-mana creatures aren't particularly special, yeah? Eater of the Dead is kinda cool. He's a Horror (the aesthetic lines between what counts as a Horror, a Demon or a Devil is really blurry, even with modern retcons) that eats corpses. It's another early example of the Exile (or 'remove from play') effect matters, in this case a flavourful representation of Eater here consuming the physical corpse in a physical graveyard. Pretty simple demon-guy design, with a dog head and Baphomet goat horns and wings and whatnot... though those eyeballs on his shoulders are kind of neat. 

Word of Binding just taps creatures. Pretty simple sorcery, if not for the fact of the very cool horror (it's a horror, right?) displayed in the picture. A nasty, 90's-00's edgy grimdark flesh-monster with huge fangs, a whip-like tongue with jagged teeth and no eyes. Oh, and fleshy tentacles all over his body. Pretty creepy, pretty badass! It's just rather strange that the effect of a presumably holy 'Word of Binding' is given to... Black instead of White. Huh?

Oh, I absolutely love the artwork for Worms of the Earth. Giant worms burrowing under the earth has been a pretty great fantasy feature, and I really like Maddocks' artwork here of this poor schmuck hammering away on the ground. The tip of the worm's tail pokes out behind him, and yeah, that is a big worm... but still manageable to the man, presumably. But the artwork's cross-section of the ground beneath shows just how massive and undulating the body of the earthworm truly is. Pretty cool artwork!

The effect, again, isn't particularly strong even for that era of MTG, but I like the flavour of the worms tunneling around and preventing both players from casting land cards. Someone has to sacrifice lands to feed the worms, or just take 5 damage from presumably challenging the worms directly. 

And just like that, we're out of Black and into Blue... and that's not a particularly worthy set of cards for an expansion that implies the rise of dark powers, is it? Yeah. For Blue, The Dark gives us a bunch of brand-new animals that are interesting for the novelty of being the first time these animals show up. 

And a sign of the age of the original versions of these articles is Giant Shark here. My original writeup, circa 2019, bitched about how 'Shark' was reduced to a boring 'Fish', and how a lot of creature types were 'over-rolled' into an umbrella term. Since then, Sharks have been reinstated as their own creature type. Nice artwork of a shark here, although the card itself is pretty terrible -- with Giant Shark having the notoriously bad 'Islandhome' mechanic. 

Water Wurm is a pretty fun aquatic worm. I don't think it's based on any specific type of worm, but it's got a nice artwork of a segmented, legless body and tapering antennae. There are a surprising amount of worms that live in the ocean other than the virally popular bobbit worm. This guy reminds me of the deceptively long beach worms I've seen in many walks to beaches.

Oh yeah, I love this guy. Leviathan is one of the bigger creatures in MTG, and still is. A massive 10/10 means that physically, the Leviathan is stronger than even the Elder Dragons we've seen in the previous expansion. MTG still hasn't really gone all that far beyond double-digits, reserving it for the biggest cosmic monsters and gods, which is a nice bit of powercreep restraint. 

What a massive creature, too -- a simple design of a massive, whale-like serpent that's seemingly made up of water. And that would be the knee-jerk response to this -- a 'leviathan' is usually a sea serpent, right? And the blue background makes it easy to mistake this creature as swimming through the ocean. But a closer inspection shows that it's a house in the foreground, meaning that this isn't just a monstrously gigantic whale-serpent, it's a monstrously gigantic whale-serpent big enough to swallow a house with a single gulp. Awesome! 

(The card itself is terribly pricey with a cost to even untap, so it's very impractical, but cool art!)

Dance of Many has a nice artwork of a bunch of orange-and-blue sea slugs that have butterfly wings dancing in an altar. Very surreal-looking! That is a terribly-formatted paragraph there, but basically Dance of Many allows you to copy a target creature, and you have to keep paying mana (i.e. keep dancing) for this copy to exist on the battlefield. No explanation to what these slugs are, but they sure are dancing! 

MIND BOMB! My favourite card on this page, no questions asked. It's so ridiculous! It has nothing to do with 'the Dark'. It's a bomb made entirely of brain matter -- complete with a cerebral fissure -- and you have the missile shell casings being ejected as if by psychic energy. (Incidentally, what are those shell casings made up of? Skull bone? Probably skull bone.) Somewhere out there is a mad mage that drops these things down from the stratosphere down upon his enemies. 

Incidentally, Mind Bomb is one of those 'anti-colour-pie' cards that should not happen. Blue isn't supposed to be able to do direct damage to the player, or to disrupt them via discard. It doesn't seem like much, but from a mechanic game-design standpoint, giving different colours access to too much of what the other colours are meant to do destroys the whole appeal of playing in a certain style.

That is such a creepy depiction of Amnesia. Memory loss is legitimately one of the things I'm afraid will happen to me. Is that why I like listing down things? Perhaps. But the giant fleshy hole in that man's head, and the brain-dead expression on his face... pretty creepy. The flavour text makes it even creepier, because it implies that this brutal showcase of amnesia is actually voluntary, as the person's trying to forget something particularly horrible he saw. 

Psychic Allergy! As someone who's struggled with allergies his whole life, this is a fun -- if grisly -- card. Very nasty artwork of the allergic reaction to that guy touching the portrait. Psychic Allergy causes each player to be damaged by whichever colour that that is chosen by the spell's caster... and you tend to control lots of cards of whatever colour you're playing. Psychic Allergy has one of the 'continual sacrifice of lands' that is always going to be unsustainable, though. 

The Lurker (it's considered a 'Beast', which is another one of those very ambiguous creature types) reminds me of some kind of a sasquatch-y creature? Humanoid body, long arms with long claws... that face is really nasty, though. The beard and the scrunched-up features are whatever, but I'm not sure if his mouth is just full of saliva, or if it's actually held together by some kind of mucous-slimed tendrils. 

 is a more typical sort of sasquatch-y forest beast, a giant muscular humanoid with claws that hunts down people while making use of its ability to hide in the jungle, but I really do like that horrifying face they gave him. Especially the mouth, which seems to be held together by stringy tendrils.

Land Leeches! Speaking of animals that have retained their own identity and not rolled into some other category are leeches, a creepy-crawly that makes its debut here. Land Leeches are our very first leech, and... well, they do have the segmented black body down pat, but they're missing the iconic fang-like sucker that real leeches are famous for. This one is just a 2/2 with First Strike, which, if you forget, allows the creature to deal damage first before its opponent. I guess the flavour here is that the leech ambushes its opponent, and attacks with its 2 damage before the opponent can react. 

Spitting Slug just looks super wretched. Compare it to the "Giant Slug" card we saw in Legends, which looks badass and threatening. This guy looks like it's in its last throes. The slug's regular anatomy is bunched up into two hunchbacked-esque blobs. One of its eyestalks is missing, and its mouth just looks uncomfortable as it keeps vomiting out some form of slug-spew. 

Its ability makes it even more pathetic. You can pay mana to give Spitting Slug the same 'First Strike' keyword that Land Leeches have. Pumping mana to make your creatures stronger, pretty simple, right? But if you don't do this, any creature fighting Spitting Slug gains First Strike instead. Meaning that if you don't actually give it this mana boost, the slug is so slow and useless, so slow, in fact, that the opponent might as well as have First Strike. Poor slug! 

A Carnivorous Plant is pretty much a shoo-in at some point for any fantasy setting. And this plant is your typical exaggerated Audrey-II style venus flytrap. I really like how the artwork makes the sleeping 'head' feel a fair bit disguised among the rest of the green brambles and vines... though closer inspection shows a slightly-less-obvious roaring head on the upper right. 

This thing is a Wall, by the way, predating the 'Plant' creature type. It's a bit of a rarity in these earlier sets where unique creature types are the rule rather than the exception, though of course it ends up being a 'Plant Wall' later on. I suppose it just means that these particular plants are rooted to the spot. 

Wormwood Treefolk looks a bit more awkward, but probably one of the more badass "Treefolk" in early MTG. It reminds me of the Ancients from Warcraft III! I like the wretched, classic evil-witch-like face, and how this entire thing is just a roaring face with long arms and chunky legs. With its associated-with-disease name, Wormwood Treefolk is the set's token attempt at trying to depict 'the Dark', with some Green cards helping Black when they're supposed to be 'enemy colours'. Not the most obvious way of doing so, design team! 

We're in Red now, and Ball Lightning is an iconic creature for Red! Real-world Ball Lightnings are ephemeral phenomena, and this Elemental does exactly that. It shows up with its insanely slanted statline (6/1), is has Haste (meaning it's super-fast, and can attack the moment it hits the battlefield) and Trample (so any damage it deals after killing an opponent creature gets 'carried over' to the opposite player). Pretty powerful, and it's essentially a spell similar to Red's Fireballs and Lightning Bolts in creature form... and Ball Lightning even dies at the end of the turn, meaning that the reason of playing this is to just charge in and deal 6 damage cheaply in a trade. In an expansion infamous for designers 'not getting' the colour identity, Ball Lightning is a very Red card. 

Also something that Red does well in The Dark is actual tribal synergy. We've got a lot of goblins, and goblin support cards. I'm not going to list all of them here (which I did in the original version of this article), but Goblin Digging Team is quite fun. It's got the typical flavour of black comedy associated with the goblins, where the Digging Team are sent to destroy a wall through underground tunnels... but they don't think of how to get out, and get killed by a cave-in. Silly goblins! The effect is pretty much that -- sacrifice this creature to destroy a wall!

Goblin Rock Sled is... it's just utterly hilarious, with that goblin wearing a funny little red cap, snow goggles, and apparently spends its time just zooming around on a sled. It's a sled that looks insanely modern-looking! And it's a rock sled, which means that it's something that's meant to slide down mountains, which ties into the fact that this creature can only attack if the enemy has a Mountain. 

The initial creature type here being "Rock Sled" while the creature name and art contained "Goblin", in a set where a lot of cards cared about Goblins being around, was the start of classic Magic's troubles with creature types until the Great Creature Type Upgrade retcons I keep mentioning. 

We have two or three more goblins in Red, which just features a bunch of regular goblins... but Goblin Hero deserves a bit of a mention here for looking so weird. Look at that! It doesn't look like MTG's usual goblins, and looks more like a psychotic demon. The head looks more like a malformed horse, and he's got bones jutting out of his elbows. It just looks nasty!

I tried a bit too hard to talk about the White creatures in my initial review of this expansion, and... well, to be frank, all of the White-mana creatures in this set are all just some variation of 'human doing human stuff', and at this point, four expansions in, I think we've ran the gamut of human paladins, priests, clerics, citizens and whatnot. But Preachers? We haven't had preachers, mostly because those are a bit more contemporary. This sure is a very angry preacher with very modern-looking clothes and stained-glass windows. It'll take White a fair bit more to become a cooler colour, but I like the sinister undertones of an angry Preacher having a brainwashing effect. 

Angry Mob is also a fun White card that's not just squeaky-clean, being a nice, painting-like artwork of a mob with torches. Of course they trample over enemies. And they get stronger the more Swamps (or 'obviously evil' things) the enemy controls.


We have Dark Heart of the Wood, which I really just like the imagery of. It's a literal heart in the middle of the woods. A floating, black heart spreading white energy. It looks almost serene, if it wasn't so ominous. The flavour text is also pretty creepy, describing how goblins are afraid of the place, and noting how the ground scuttles and the tree limbs twist in agony.

Maze of Ith just looks utterly bizarre, and it looks like some sort of giant... brain-intestine-tumour thing? It's also a maze, so it's transversible by people... who, I guess, won't be having a good time trying to squeeze themselves through tunnels shaped like intestines. Just what is this? Some gigantic organism that is titanic enough that people can walk inside it? 


I really like Scarecrows as a horror monster, and it's quite inevitable that they are represented as an 'artifact creature', which tends to be golems and other artificial living things. Scarecrows would be upgraded into their own creature type later on, which is nice! This is a nicely ragged specimen, and the artwork's button eyes and fanged teeth matches the flavour text of "more malice... than should have been possible in something that had never known life". Love that the effect is anti-flying-creatures, i.e., anti-crows!

I play a fair bit of Commander, and in that multi-player format, Fellwar Stone is actually quite a useful little artifact to use to generate mana! Not much for me to actually say about a stone, but I've seen Fellwar Stone too much not to at least acknowledge it when it shows up among a pile of artifacts I'm indifferent about. 

And that's it for The Dark! Tune in next time for probably my favourite among the older expansions, Fallen Empires!

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And now, for the rest of the expansion:

The Fallen is a zombie, and apparently one where the dark magic backfired on the caster. Dude seems pretty happy with his situation! Murk Dwellers are also zombies, which can be hard to tell with the very painting-like art style. 

The Banshee is yet another fantasy term that often gets slapped into another variant of undead. Later retcons would make this into a 'Spirit'. 

Bog Rats doesn't have the 'stacking' gimmick of the Plague Rats from Alpha, but I like that it can't be blocked by walls... rats can always get into your house! 

I like the ominous artwork of the creepy skull in the miasma of the air in Season of the Witch. 

I like the detail of the creepy idol in Curse Artifact. With Black being the colour of swamps, I find it funny that weaponized Marsh Gas is a spell that a warlock can cast in this universe. 

Ghost Ship isn't actually a ship, it's actually a Spirit. It's the ghost of a ship, not an actual ship, silly! I guess this particular ship has enough of a soul to be a spirit. Electric Eel is another fish type that I'm happy to show up in the game. Drowned is a nice zombie card, it reminds me of that one scene from the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie. 

Oh, a cute hammerhead shark in Deep Water! Wonder if this was originally meant to be artwork for a creature card until they realized they had too many fishies in this expansion. That poor merfolk in Tangle Kelp must've been sleeping or something to get himself wrapped by kelp while facing upwards. 

I really like the serene look of the Sunken City. Green gets a lot of humans in forests, and... it's kind of another strike against the whole "The Dark" theme when all of these forests seem to be doing just fine in the sunlight. 

Elves of Deep Shadow is one of the supposed gimmicks of 'the Dark', where White's ally colours (Green and Blue) have effects that support their enemies (Black and Red) instead. It's quaint nowadays where all colour combinations are commonly found in any given expansion, and it's not really a standout in this one either.

Niall Silvain is another card that really feels like it should be a legendary card, considering how it's an actual name and the flavour text does speak about how "this is his domain". Instead he's just a random ouphe.

Marsh Viper is... it's a nice-looking viper, and another card that uses the 'poison conuter' mechanic. 

Oh, did you guys know Whippoorwill is an actual bird name? I didn't, not until I was doing reviews for MTG! It's cute. Note, by the way, that Whippoorwill, despite being a bird in flight, does not have Flying. This ended up causing an internal rule within WOTC where all cards that are shown flying in artwork must have Flying, or vice versa. 

That is a rather cool wood-elemental guy in Gaea's Touch. It's got a skeletal body and overly-long fingers that taper into vines. Most fun is its face, made up of a fanged mouth, nostrils and a bunch of branches.

As I mentioned before, we've got a bunch more goblins. Goblin Wizard looks quite wretched, while Goblins of the Flarg have samurai armour for some reason. Interestingly, Orc General gets in on the game, having some synergy with goblin sacrifice (even if he buffs orcs instead). 

I find it hilarious that the original races of Brothers of Fire and Sisters of the Flame are just "Brothers" and "Sisters". 

Blood Moon is probably one of the few cards here that actually acknowledge that 'The Dark' is meant to take place in, well, the dark. 


We've got two more enchantments that support goblins, with Goblin Shrine and Goblin Caves. Again, not too interesting for me to really talk about, but it's a nice early showcase of good tribal cards after the failure of the kobolds in the last expansion. 

We now have the rest of the White-aligned cards! Pikemen, Squire and Knights of Thorn are varying kinds of knight and soldier-themed minions. I actually like the presence of Witch Hunter -- religious zealotry, villains who think they're doing right, feels quite 'White'. 

Miracle Worker and Exorcist are more cleric-themed, and we also have Fasting with a cross on the window. MTG would obviously shy away from explicit real-world religious references, so I'm surprised to see this here. 

Brainwash, surprisingly, does not actually brainwash and steal an enemy creature, but merely keeps it from attacking. 'Dust to Dust' forms a pair with 'Ashes to Ashes' on Black. 

I really like Festival! It's a fun artwork with some fancy feathers and masks and jester caps... and the flavour text implies that this merry celebration isn't actually as harmless as it seems. Ooh, spooky! White, you can be cool if you try!

I assume it's the work of people like Witch Hunters that Martyr's Cry is happening? We also have Tivadar's Crusade, a card meant to counter Red's Goblin synergy... and the artwork is a pretty brutal crucified goblin being paraded around. Tivadar is mentioned in 'Knights of the Thorn' and 'Morale', but wouldn't get his card until much later. 

We have two more goblins among the multi-coloured cards. We only have a few, huh?

Marsh Goblins and Scarwood Goblins are two more goblin cards to add to your Red decks, though they also look quite different. Scarwood looks like one of those World of Warcraft trolls, minus tusks. While Marsh Goblins (with its 'unwholesome customs') is just a naked short man. 

Okay, Necropolis is an Artifact Creature? I guess it's a living city. Or, well, a living wall. A 0/1 living wall. Yeah, the flavour of lands versus artifacts versus artifact creatures is still not very consistent here. 

I like the ambiguity of whatever the heck is happening with Diabolic Machine. That guy's being crushed between its gears, while the giant Transformers eyes of the machine looms in the background. Thanks to the power of alternate card arts, we know absolutely what this thing looks like from afar... but it becomes a bit less diabolic that way, yeah? 

I really like the artwork in Living Armor. It almost looks like it's made up of skeleton or bug chitin or something... and the flavour text implies that it's painful to wear. Kinda looks bondage-y, admittedly.

I really like Amy Weber's art for Stone Calendar. It looks way more complex than a calendar!

Yeah, the flavour team still hasn't quite got what's an 'artifact' and what's a 'land'. I have a feeling that most if not all of Tower of Coircall, Standing Stones, Tormod's Crypt and Barl's Cage would've been flavoured as lands if they were created with the modern mindset.

Presumably, the Wand of Ith is made by the same wizard that made the Maze of Ith. 

Oh hey, Skull of Orm! It's missing one eye... we know that the Evil Eye of Orms-By-Gore is a monster, as seen in Legends, so I guess this is the rest of Orm or Orms or however you spell his name! 

We've got a couple of new Lands. Is it beating the dead horse for me to mention that only City of Shadows shows off the darkness that's supposed to be enveloping the land?

Sorrow's Path is showing a weird scene of a magician tormenting someone, while in the background a dragon and a bunch of knights are fighting. It's voted by some of MTG's head designers as single-handedly one of the worst-designed cards... it has a penalty for an effect that's basically useless!

Anyway, that's curtains for the Dark. I admit that I had a fair amount of fun talking about the monsters in this expansion than I thought I would, mostly because I remembered not being a fan of this expansion. See you guys next time for Fallen Empires!