Reviewing Magic: The Gathering #7 - Ice Age

After the two smaller blocks of the Dark and Fallen Empires (in addition to some reprint/core sets like Revised and Fourth Edition which reprints cards from the first three sets), we finally enter the next big thing for MTG, Ice Age.

And it's interesting to note that Ice Age was one of the bigger setes introduced at 380+ cards, and was originally conceived as a separate or a sequel game to Magic: The Gathering. As in, it was going to be "Magic: Ice Age". Marketing and brand recognizability quashed this plan, but Ice Age also reprinted a bunch of cards from older expansions (sometimes with new art!) with the intention that it could be treated as a separate, independent product. 

This would later blossom into the 'drafting' format of play -- where the set was internally balanced so players would take turns opening boosters and pass them around to create decks that were on the same power level at each other. It's also the first genesis of the 'block' product layout that would last for a majority of MTG's lifetime, where a big 300+ card set (like Ice Age) would introduce a major theme and mechanics, and it would be followed up by usually two smaller 100+ card sets that built on the 'big' set in the block both story-wise and mechanics-wise. 

Ice Age is thematically showing the world of Dominaria after the events of Antiquities, The Dark and Fallen Empires. The results of the huge Sylex blast during Antiquities plunged the world into a climate change and an ice age. As the war-wracked Dominaria adapted to the incoming Ice Age, the big threat is the mighty necromancer Lim-Dûl. Flavour-wise, this gives the set a distinct look and vibe, with many of the artwork comissioned for the set displaying snow-covered landscapes or Nordic-insipred visuals.

Ice Age introduced a couple of new mechanics -- Snow Lands are a mechanic almost unique to the block, with some cards requiring you to play a specific snow-covered version of a basic land. Cummulative Upkeep, an upgraded version of the 'upkeep' that we've seen on various cards before, also show up here -- a rather unpopular mechanic where the tax on maintaining your permanents increases each turn. 

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As usual, we start off with Black, and we'll start off with Drift of the Dead. It's another Wall-type creature, this time made up of a frozen bank of skeletons. Something that I complained about The Dark was that it wasn't particularly representative of the theme of the expansion... Ice Age, meanwhile, had no such problems where cards all over different colours all show off the frozen landscape that has befallen Dominaria. This card also has interaction with the new 'Snow' lands. 'Snow' has since been quite specific to Ice Age and the two or three expansions that are tied to it. MTG has been quite hesitant at playing around with limiting cards with mana-generation mechanics, which I think is ultimately for the best. 

Norritt is just some guy's name, isn't it? However, because this Imp isn't a legendary creature, one has to stand to assume that just like Uncle Istvan, "Norritts" are just a type of creature, a sub-type of imps. He's a cheeky-looking imp, reminding me of Beast from the older X-Men comics with some super-large fin-ears. One of his effects is a primitive version of what would be known as 'goad' in future sets, which is to force one of your opponent's creatures to attack -- thereby making it susceptible to destruction by combat; or to simply prevent it from tapping for abilities.

One thing that always impresses me from D&D and other fantasy games is just how many words and variations we have for "undead". Even for something like zombies! Both 'wights' and 'ghouls' are considered zombies in MTG, but they could've very easily be their own class of creatures, yeah? They sure are in D&D and Pathfinder and many other fantasy settings. The Dread Wight is the simpler of these two zombies, being a blue-skinned guy with some really awesome hair. He's got the ability to put tokens that paralyze creatures until the controller pays a cost with mana to heal them. 

Ashen Ghoul is a particularly creepy piece of artwork, being an old-man corpse with overly long limbs, sunken eyes, and a body that looks like it's malnourished even before it's dead. The flavour of ghouls tend to be associated with either cannibalism or eating corpses, and this guy is most certainly eating something that's covered in blood and viscera. Grisly!

In addition to the 'Haste' ability (which means it can attack the turn it comes to play), Ashen Ghoul also has an interesting ability of returning from the graveyard. That in and of itself isn't new; we've had that in Black since Alpha... but Ashen Ghoul is one of the few cards that care about the order of your graveyard. It needs 'three creature cards' buried above it, which is a facet that most sets don't do because the graveyard tends to be shuffled around a lot more as players check cards inside them, making the keeping track of graveyard order particularly difficult. 

Foul Familiar is an interesting Spirit. The creature's design is this strange, somewhat-phallic ethereal figure with six eyes and a huge grin coming out of a dead-eyed woman's forehead. Really like the detailing on the artwork of the 'webbing' connecting the Foul Familiar to the human. An interesting effect, too, where this creature can't be used to block, and can be returned to your hand by paying life and mana. It's one of those 'selfish' minions Black often gets, and the flavour does work for a 'foul' familiar -- instead of being undyingly loyal to its summoner, it just stops short at being willing to take a hit for its master. And if the human in the art is indeed the mage summoning the familiar, she looks like she's not having a particularly good time of it. 

Hyalopterous Lemure is a pretty fun card for the story behind its creation. A 'lemure' is a type of vengeful spirit in Roman mythology. And a 'hyalopterous' lemure would be a spirit with thin wings. But somewhere, a miscomunication ended up with the artist drawing a 'hyalopterous lemur', a cute little mammal, with butterfly wings. The team decided to roll with this misunderstanding, making the hyalpoterous lemure's cute appearance be part of its hunting tactics -- the flavour text describe it being harmless until it attacks, at which point it devours its prey until only bones remained. 

I also like that the creature is still a 'lemure', and later on a 'Spirit'. It's a lemure that takes the form of a lemur! A fun little easter egg is that a reversed version of the mistake is given a shout-out in Time Spiral's Viscid Lemures, which shows what a 'lemure' is supposed to look like... and with the people in the flavour text mixing it up with lemurs. Oh, gotta love in-jokes.

Gangreous Zombies is another 'Snow-lands matters' card, though that's not the most nasty thing about it. We've seen enough zombies, but the artwork for these particular zombies is pretty creepy! The zombie lurching forwards in the background is covered with mottled, green flesh sloughing off his body, while the one in the foreground has his stomach burst open and his intestines are spilling out. Nasty!

A lot of the flavour text in Ice Age also talks about the main villain -- the necromancer Lim-Dûl (who I will inevitably refer to as Lim-Dul at some point in this review). As per the norm in these early sets, Lim-Dûl won't get a card... but he gets a fair chunk of representation! Legions of Lim-Dûl is one of the various minions he creates, and the artwork is quite creepy as one of Lim-Dûl's minions (or is that the man himself?) stands in the background, wearing a skull-shaped mask and stitching the final touch on another excellently-grisly zombie. The slightly-rotten flesh and blank expression really does make this artwork explain the flavour text -- of these zombies wearing the dead faces of your allies -- quite well.

We've got more vilains, though they're only represented in card form as their minions. Literally, too! Minion of Tevesh Szat is a 'Demon Minion', because, yes, 'minion' is a creature type with some interactions in future sets. Szat himself is a character introduced in Fallen Empires' tie-in fiction -- and I do find it really nice that the cards do try their best to represent its lore. We only see part of the Minion here, but it's got a nicely deformed skull for a head, and its entire body is yellow. I like the subtle little pinprick of white pupil in the yawning eye sockets, as well as some bony horns, though I kind of wished we could've seen more of what it looks like. 

Right, Leshrac the Tormented Soul from DOTA is a reference to this vilain from MTG! Minion of Leshrac is another 'Demon Minion', although he really just looks like a particularly monstrous bat monster. It is interesting that both Minions have the shared mechanic of you needing to pay an upkeep cost or they deal damage to you... although I suppose you, dear player, is not Leshrac. And that bat-demon is the Minion of Leshrac, not your minion!

Leshrac is a powerful planeswalker trapped on Dominaria, and together with Tevesh Szat, manipulated Lim-Dûl into causing his big zombie invasion.

Mole Worms is a rare 'worm' -- not a wurm -- in Magic the Gathering! And what a weird worm he is. Combining two subterranean, burrowing creatures, he Mole Worm has very mean-looking claws on its three fingers, and a creepy face that looks a bit too much like a scrunched-up old man. I know moles do have weird fleshy faces, but still. As with most burrowing creatures, this creature interacts with enemy land cards, disabling one of their lands as long as you don't untap him. 

The Flow of Maggots is an Insect monster, and it's pretty creepy-looking artwork. The parent fly perching on a huge, writhing swarm of black maggots is expected. What makes this card art grisly are the borders, which are the dripping flesh and viscera of whatever poor sod became the victim of this flow of maggots. What a way to describe a mass of grubs, huh? It's not a 'swarm' or a 'mass' or a 'clutch'. It's flowing. Very visceral word choice. Really creepy flavour text, too, to top it off.

The Flow of Maggots is unblockable by anything that isn't a wall, which is actually quite powerful... though it also has a cumulative upkeep, which means the controller needs to pay an increasingly high amount of mana to keep this thing in the battlefield. It's so interesting that it's not just powerful demons or whatever that demand cumulative upkeep, but also this writhing mass of grubs. 

As with many of my original circa-2019 MTG reviews, I actually talked about every single creature on the set, which ended up being quite repetitive. A lot of them is just 'another zombie' or 'another specter', which... if there's not much that's interesting to talk about, gets consolidated and tossed down to the post-break segment. I do like Krovikan Vampire quite a bit, though. This is MTG's second vampire, and it's interesting to see how a lot of the 'tribes' that we would take for granted in future sets take some time to go on. The Krovikan Vampire is a more 'classic' Hollywood-horror bloodsucker compared to the more bestial Sengir Vampire from Alpha. He's got a very fun effect, too, which essentially resurrects the creatures he kills as thralls that are 'bound' to him -- when the Krovikan Vampire dies, so do the resurrected minions!

Ice Age has a lot of fun sorceries like Mind Ravel as well -- a very cool and unsettling piece of art as the spellcaster quite literally unravels the mind of his poor victim. "An end to reason, an end to order, forget all that has been". The guy's body gets turned into an almost brain-like consistency as it's being unraveled, and you can see the eye and ear of the poor sod. As with most spells (usually Black and Blue) that acts as a psychic attack, Mind Ravel forces your opponent to discard cards. 

Necropotence probably would remind players of one of the best and most notorious cards -- Yawgmoth's Bargain. But even then, Necropotence is basically a card that broke the game a bit and is still banned in some formats. Necropotence essentially, at the very low cost of 'cards that are discarded get exiled', swaps your regular draw phase for 'pay X life, draw X cards next turn'. Really, the only life point that matters is your final one. And being able to draw basically half your deck for the low cost of 3 mana? Extremely potent, I should say. Black using life to draw cards is going to be the source of some of the strongest cards ever. 

The artwork is pretty cool too. A skeleton with a Hearthstone spiral carved into his head, and he's got a neat set of spiky armour that warps all around the picture border, while his finger is casting a spiral spell himself. Very cool. (I made through that review without making an impotence joke. Ha!)

Stench of Evil, at first glance, reminds me of the Behelit from Berserk. It's a giant screaming face carved onto an egg-shaped building with spikes all around it. Faces in unnatural, non-organic structures are always creepy! But it's not the fact that this is a living structure that makes it powerful, it's apparently the stench. It's smelly! This giant demon spiky-egg-face has such bad halitosis that its breath demolishes all Plains and damages its controller! 

Our last Black card is Dance of the Dead, which is one of the rare 'enchant a creature in the graveyard' cards from these earlier sets. It's a little novella written into the card, but basically Dance of the Dead resurrects a dead creature with this Enchantment attached to it, and a buff to boot... but the controller needs to pay 2 mana to untap the creature. There is no flavour text to the contrary, but since 'untapping' is essentially the game's shorthand for being unable to attack because they are doing something else (like activating their ability), I'm going to assume that Dance of the Dead causes the resurrected creature to dance the fandango unless you pay them money. That mental image made me like this card enough to include it here. Look at those skeletons, they're having some fun while they dance!

We are going to Blue, now, and we'll start off with Balduvian Conjurer. Who, despite the intense Giger-esque ridging all around his body, is actually just a regular Human Wizard. You can see him creating a tentacled creature in the background, which ties into his effect -- the Conjurer temporarily turns one of your Snow-lands into a 2/2 creature at the cost of not getting mana from that land! Ice Age tends to be quite good at showing icebergs and glaciers in the backgrounds of their art, but Blue cards are especially great at it. 

Look at the Polar Kraken! At 11/11, it's one of the biggest creatures in MTG at the time... and honestly, not too many creatures breach the double digits even now. Krakens in MTG aren't always giant squids or octopi, and some are just giant nondescript, quasi-dinosaurian, quasi-serpentine beasts like this guy. Look at him! We can only see part of his huge body, and it's big enough to much on an iceberg, with those poor polar bears falling off. Love the flavour text emphasizing just how big this creature is. 

Polar Kraken is a big creature with Trample (which means excess damage after killing a creature goes on to the opposing player since the Kraken is big enough to rush through and hit you), but it also has one of the least popular mechanics -- cumulative upkeep. And sacrificing morew and more land cards is just not sustainable. It works, flavour-wise, as the Polar Kraken keeps eating your lands, but generally big creatures are afraid of creature-specific removal even without an increasing tumour of a downside. 

Phantasmal Mount, later retconned into an 'Illusion Horse', reminds me of some of its artist's previous Merfolk artwork with the gorgeous patterning. I really like the fins running down its spine and across its head, the strangely feline tail, the catfish-like facial hair, and multiple eyes. I like it! It's almost just a weird aquatic horse, but the more you look, the more it looks just a bit off. The Phantasmal Mount gives an ally creature a primitive version of the much-later 'Crew' or 'Mount' mechanic, where it grants a buff to a creature... but with the caveat that if either one of them dies, they both die. 

Illusionary Wall is hilarious. Blue gets two more Walls that we'll cover after the break, but I love this one. It's a flying illusion of a brick wall, made out of glowing lights. Which is a bizarre enough visual image! But then you look at the abilities... 'First Strike', which allows a creature to deal damage before its opponent (and potentially kill the enemy creature before they deal their damage). It's an ability normally reserved for skillful warriors and martial artists or speedy beasts, so it's really weird for it to be given to a floating hologram wall... until you read the flavour text and see the nstatline. "When they no longer trust their senses, that's the time to strike." So the 7-attack statline and the First Strike keyword represents the archmage summoning the wall attacking the opponents that are confused. That's cool!

Sea Spirit is an 'Elemental Spirit' with a very serene vista of a stormy, arctic sea while this ephemeral figure rises up of the surface of the ocean. And then you realize that there's a tiny boat, which barely reaches the Spirit's thighs. Very atmospheric flavour text, too, which paints a haunting image of an unfathomably large nature spirit, the representation of the ice-laden waves... but then it's a mere 2/3. Oy. 

Hell yes, Shyft! What a cool name for a Shapeshifter creature, too. Shyft! The effect is sadly not particularly useful, since changing the colour of a creature card doesn't matter that much to account for Shyft's poor stat-to-mana ratio. But that artwork! Look at this bright, colourful jumbled-up mass of limbs, tendrils and tentacles. There's almost a butterfly or wyvern-like vibe to him due to the prominent wings, but he's also got way too many legs arranged in strange directions, and a not-quite-human face with green tendrils growing out of it. Is this Shyft's natural form, or is it in mid-transformation? 

I am a huge fan of the artwork for Mistfolk, a creature also identified as 'Illusion'. A lot of the creatures in this set are Illusions, apparently! Really love the haunting hooded figures drifting through the trees, and I like how the foliage is positioned to partially obscure them. The flavour text is particularly fun for this one, taking the form of the report of a confused soldier being creeped out by how consistent the eyewitness accounts are for the strange descriptions of the Mistfolk. There's almost a cryptid-esque certainty to it. I like it!

Love love love the artwork for Illusions of Grandeur. It's a bit hard to make out over the big, colourfulj flashy dragon, but that dragon is an illusion scaring the human knights. Looking closely at the base of the dragon is a tiny little cute little bunny. It's glorious. The effect of Illusions of Grandeur is pretty simple -- you gain 20 life as long as the enchantment is in play, but you lose it when it's gone, because it's an illusion after all. The problem? That pesky 'cumulative upkeep' thing that I think we've established is too much of a detriment when it adds up over time. 

Illusions of Grandeur turns out to be a hilarious card in later sets, though, with cards like Donate allowing you to gain 20 life, then gift this card with its two negative effects (the lose 20 life and cumulative upkeep) for your opponent to deal with. 

Ice Age introduces a type of card that are termed by the fandom as 'cantrips', which are spells that cost 1 mana, draws you a card, and does something extra. Like Clairvoyance here, which has the additional effect of peeking int your opponent's hand. Really like the artwork for this one, with a wispy figure that looks like a bit of a break in reality as a sorcerer spies down on the confused viking on the ground level. I like the weird pose that the clairvoyant is in, too, which looks confused herself instead of sinister. The whole thing just looks surreal to me in all the best way. 


MYSTIC REMORA. I love Mystic Remora. It's an Enchantment, and the artwork is just literally a remora fish, one of those fishies with suckers that latch on to whales and sharks to feed off their scraps. Such a wacky choice for an enchantment, and I wonder if this was originally artwork commissioned for a creature? The Mystic Remora allows you to draw a card whenever your opponent casts a non-creature spell, which I guess is the 'feeding off the scraps' here. 

I love Reality Twist's artwork. It looks like a chessboard being bent around like a handkerchief, while some chess pieces and actual people are being tossed around. The effect is so severe that it causes all basic lands that aren't Islands to produce the wrong kinds of mana. Pretty fun and flavourful! I like this one. 

Brainstorm is a more 'fair' version of Ancestral Recall, one of the utterly broken card from Alpha. Turns out it's still very good, and sees play even now. That alone wouldn't cause Brainstorm to make it here, but I love the visual of a mage with whited-out eyes (and mouth, too, for some reason), while a literal storm explodes from his brain. A literal brain storm! But the flavour text paints a different picture, where the royal mage Gustha was hit so hard in the head that she actually gained some clarity to know what to do and win the combat. That's not a brainstorm, that's a concussion! 

We are into green now, and we'll start off with Fyndhorn Elves. Fyndhorn Elves don't really look like anything special, just a couple of Tolkien-y elves lurking in the icy jungle. But its statline and effect, a 1/1 that adds green mana upon tapping, is exactly the same as Llanowar Elves from Alpha... with one specific exception. The card name. Which means that by deck-building standards, you can have, instead of the regular limit of four Llanowar Elves, functionally eight of them with four Llanowars and four Fyndhorns. This is called a 'Functional Reprint', where it's technically a different card due to having a different name. Sometimes this is done for flavour reasons (they needed a certain effect at a certain mana level, but the original printing doesn't work for a plane where, say, the Llanowar Forest does not exist). But with such a powerful effect as having mana generation on a creature, it's also something that can spiral out of control. For elves, for a while, it definitely did! 

There are a lot of animals -- mammoths and polar bears and aurochs -- in this expansion. I made the mistake of trying to do a paragraph on all of them. But dinosaurs are special. We get our very first dinosaur! Even though dinosaurs had long died out before our world's Ice Age, I guess there's some kind of subconscious association thanks to media between dinosaurs and ice-age extinctions. Pygmy Allosaurus is a pretty neat dinosaur, even if it is a pretty simple 'French Vanilla' 2/2 Swampwalk creature. 

Dinosaur is very notable in that it's one of the types that were 'consolidated' and deleted during the Great Creature Type Update, because dinosaurs are unlikely to show up in MTG, right? Too silly, right? So Pygmy Allosaurus and the handful of other dinosaurs are considered 'Lizard Beasts'. That is, until 2017's Ixalan block, which is a plane all about dinosaurs, which brought back the creature type in full force. And now we even have actual crossovers with Jurassic Park. Crossovers are weird! 

Eyy, look at Chub Toad here. He's a giant toad with some dude's arm hanging lifelessly out of his mouth, almost resembling the frog's actual tongue. I love the bizarre mass of hedgehog spines and bony bumps on the Chub Toad's back. Pretty nice detailing on the toad's upper head as well. I also like the flavour text warning children about the dangers of the Chub Toad. 

I like that the Woolly Spider is basically a woolly-mammoth version of a spider! It's a pretty creepy face on the spider as well, and as a former arachnophobe, it definitely looks quite threatening. Nice icy fuzz on the spider that presumably allows it to camouflage itself in the icy wastelands. Like all giant spiders in MTG, the Woolly Spider has what would later be known as 'Reach', allowing it to block flying creatures. Again, love this honestly rather random property they decided all spiders need to have. 

Yavimaya Gnats aren't exactly even gnats. They look more like a generic cartoon 'stinging insect' that's got the pokey mouth of a mosquito and the threatening colours of a hornet. It's at least an appellation given in-universe by a naturalist, though. Yavimaya Forest is the setting of many Green cards in Dominaria, and it's what you'd expect from a 'the forest fights with you' flavour. Neat! 

I would like to stress that Green actually does have a lot of creatures in Ice Age. A lot of elves and animals and whatnot... but talking about each of them took up half of this article last time, so let me skip a lot of the regular animals and go straight to more fantastical ones. Like Scaled Wurm! With a 'u'! Wurms would later become the default go-to 'big beast' in Green. The vanilla 7/6 Scaled Wurm looks a fair bit more draconic with that head, and I like the nice combination of blues, greens and whites. These things thrived during the Ice Age, and apparently acted as the apex predators. 

The Johtull Wurm, on the other hand, doesn't look like a regular wurm. It has hands. What wurm has hands? The general look of the body does look like some kind of a giant mutant caterpillar or tardigrade, but it's just such a weird-looking creature. Its very nasty-looking mouth actually reminds me of the Fungusaur from Alpha, so perhaps this is a related species? The Johtull Wurm is apparently super weak towards multiple blockers, as the flavour text mentions. It actually gets a pretty significant stat decrease if your opponent blocks it with more than one creature. 

In an ice-themed expansion, having abominable snowmen is a given, isn't it? Both the Shambling Strider and Wiitigo would receive revisions to have the 'Yeti' creature type, which is the blanket term for most of MTG's 'huge, hairy man-like creature' monsters. The Shambling Strider is a simple big beast with the possibility to get a bit bigger. I like the brown fur and the devilish grin on this guy's face, and the snowy background on both the Yetis. 

The Wiitigo uses an alternate spelling for what's more popularly known as a Wendigo, and I like how the face has an almost owl-like look to it (which might be a reference to how the word 'wendigo' shares its linguistic roots with what would become 'owl'). The proportions, particularly, the arms, also look off. The Wiitigo has a strange effect where its stats increase if it's engaged in creature combat, but decreases if it doesn't participate in combat in the turn. 

Green has always been the colour that's the most receptive to nature, so it does stand to reason that most of its elves, beasts and nature spirits actually accept and thrive in the Ice Age, as unnatural as it is. We get another Dryad (our first 'official' one, though some earlier creatures would be retconned into Dryads) in Folk of the Pines. This nature spirit is a lady with a very fetching, snow-accessorized cloak that also seems to act as camouflage with pine trees. A lot of the elves and nature spirits in Ice Age worshipped Freyalise, who is a Planeswalker they mistook for a goddess. 

This set also gave us a lot of playful fair folk, like the Fyndhorn Brownie who's bursting out of a snowbank and lobbing snowballs at people. All of these 'less-traditionally-human' fairies would all be consolidated under 'Ouphe'. I like this particular critter, with his huge, mischievous grin and his super-long beard. Even the flavour text is a complaint from a recurring character called Jarkeld, who was extremely bothered by these little guys. 

There was no way this wasn't going to end with the Lhurgoyf, is it? "Ach! Hans, run! It's the Lhurgoyf!"

No, we don't get any explanation about that a Lhurgoyf is. It's a creature, based on its effect, that gets stronger based on the number of creatures in both graveyards, and since it's a Green-mana creature, it probably means that it's a scavenger of some sort. But what a weirdo of a monster! It's a vaguely humanoid, bipedal creature with gangly arms and legs, spikes running down its back, and a face that looks like a bizarre fusion of centipede and lamprey. Very cool creature, and the Lhurgoyf's weirdness and the hilarity of its non-informative flavour text made the Lhurgoyf a popular meme among the fandom and developers that this weirdo would keep showing up in future sets. 

And we have a strange little enchantment called Thoughtleech. It's an effect where the Green caster gains life any time their opponent draws mana from Islands. Which is fair, Blue mana tends to be associated with intelligence, hence a 'thought-leech'. But the design! Look at this thing. It's so weird! I can't even really properly describe it. It's like a weird cross between a crab and a slug, but with huge legs that look uncomfortably bony as it stabs you in the ear. It's got weird, almost-missable hammerhead-shark-style eyes, and its pelvis-bone-looking 'mouthpiece' extends into two tentacles that enter the person's mouth. This Facehugger-looking mofo isn't what I thought a 'Thoughtleech' would be, let alone a card I see in Green!

We're going to Red now, which actually has a lot more Goblin and Orc synergies. Nice! We'll start off with some standalone creatures first. Balduvian Hydra is such a distinctive visual for a hydra. It's got the 'snake heads branch off a snake body' model, but instead of snake or dinosaur heads, the Balduvian Hydra's multiple heads look like... bird skulls? The blue horns and the neon-green mouths make it even more distinctive. It's very cool, actually! Just like most other Hydra cards in MTG, Balduvian Hydra uses tokens to represent its many heads, though with only 1 health, this hydra has to probably keep shedding heads to tank hits. 

Why is a card called "Karplusan Yeti" prominently show two humans? Well, it's actually because the yeti's in the background, doing a very cool video game stealth takedown on the third member of the human party. I really like the smug look that the yeti has as he chokes out that guy! For the most part, once we're out of these earlier sets, creature cards would almost always make sure that the artwork makes it very clear at first glance what you're supposed to be looking at... but I also like this card making me work a bit to understand what's going on. 

Karplusan Yeti also has a very primitive version of what would be codified as 'fight', where by tapping him, he forces combat (or at least a version of combat) to happen between himself and another creature. In MTG, sometimes you need these sorts of effects to try and destroy a useful creature that your opponent refuses to assign as a blocker!

I really like these two giants. Karplusan Giant is a wonderfully story-book-like giant. He's got a massive face with a prominent, giant nose and underbite, with icicles dripping down his body. Is he covered with ice, or is he made of ice? He's not an elemental, at least, but he sure gets more powerful from Snow Lands. I like the cartoonish proportions and how he's friendly enough to lift up and try to interact with that human. That flavour text is quite mean, that giant seems to be making an effort!

Bone Shaman, is a giant shaman, and one that feels a bit more true to the sinister frost giants of Nordic myths -- not all of them are barbarian warriors! I like the hunchbacked pose, the manic grin and the crown seemingly made up of thin bones of smaller creatures like humans. A somewhat sinister-looking visage... but pay a bit more attention, and the Bone Shaman is actually likely to be benevolent. That poem-like chant in the flavour text notes that he wants 'bones in your grave to rattle no more', while his effect prevents Regeneration -- a keyword that tends to be flavoured as undead creatures springing right back to life. Bone Shaman isn't doing all this creepy bone stuff to curse you, he's in fact making sure the dead stay buried underground! Good job, Shaman!

Following Fallen Empires codifying a bit more of the 'tribal' synergy, goblins and orcs get a lot more support in Ice Age... except the goblins are a lot more comical! I'm a fan of a bit more whimsy in my trading card games, though I absolutely prefer how these older sets tended to make, like, approximately 10-20 absolutely 'silly' cards in any given set. I feel this is a direction that modern MTG has shied away from in recent expansions, though I'll save that rant when we get there. We still have three decades' worth of cards to go through!

Anyway, we do have a couple more 'regular' goblins, but I want to talk about GOBLIN SNOWMAN first and foremost. Look at these green goobers, hiding behind a big snowman and cheekily using it as a human goblin shield. Apparently this snowman is so effective that it can block knights, demons, sorcerers and elder horrors, because as long as the Goblin Snowman is blocking, it receives no damage. You can be a multiversal threat like Nicol Bolas the Dragon-God, the most ancient evil in Dominaria... but these goblins' extremely convincing snowman is apparently enough to bamboozle you. 

Goblin Ski Patrol continues the somewhat inconsistent skin tones of goblins (most modern sets settle with green or ruddy-red) by having them be purple, but maybe they're just frostbitten? Absolutely love the silliness and the seriousness of the face of the goblin in the foreground, while the latter (presumably this 'Ib Halfheart, Goblin Tactician' guy) is yelling AIIIEEEEE. 

I love that the Goblin Ski Patrol can actually gain flying... but only if you control a Snow-Covered Mountain, from which the Goblin Ski Patrol will slalom off... and then promptly die. Because he's a goblin. 

Goblin Mutant, meanwhile, is... quite horrifying! Later gaining the sub-type 'mutant', this guy is a bit more grotesque than "merely" being a three-headed goblin. Look at how disproportionately large the heads are, and pay attention to where the hands grow out of. The Goblin Mutant's left arm sprouts out of the flabby chin of the left head, while the right arm very uncomfortably bursts out of the right head's nostrils. While the left arm can still hold a sword, the left one seems to have morphed into some kind of animal feet. The artwork genuinely makes me uncomfortable! And just like the Orgg before him, the Goblin Mutant is actually scared and unable to take action against creatures with 3 power or greater. "If only it had three brains, too", says the flavour text. A wretched being!

We're going to orcs now, and this set gives us seven new orcs. While they were the more 'serious' of the Red-mana green-skinned LOTR monsters, the orcs in Ice Age tend to be goofy as well. Orcish Conscripts has a fun artwork with the lead orc picking his nose, while the two orcs next to him has some really strange choices of headwear; one wearing a helicopter hat and the other wearing a strainer. Don't ask where he got a strainer in medieval times. 

Because the strainer pales before Orcish Lumberjack, who's driving this glorious steampunk machinery that looks like something out of a more realistic interpretation of a Dr. Seuss book. Two giant chicken legs support the one-man carriage, and a giant buzzsaw on an arm goes around cutting trees. The effect is also particularly flavourful, where the Orcish Lumberjack literally destroys a forest permanently, but you get three mana! There is some commentary here about instant gratification versus sustainable, renewable energy sources, but in an aggro deck you need those mana burst to sling Chain Lightnings at the enemy face!

Orcish Librarian is 100% comedy gold. Phil Foglio is always great for these kinds of artwork. The nonplussed, bored expression on that orc, and the fact that the books around him are titled stuff like "Naked Lunch" and "The Joy of Cooking"... silly orcs, books aren't for eating! This guy is eating it with "Library Paste"! Love the silliness. The card has the effect of allowing you to reorder the top cards of your deck, but with the quite bad drawback of the Librarian eating half the cards at random. Silly orc, go back to swinging axes!


I like Orcish Farmer! I think it's a crime that he wasn't retroactively given the 'Peasant' or 'Townsfolk' job type in subsequent erratas. But not all orcs are there to run around being warriors and berserkers and shamans and librarians! Some of them have to stay in the settlements and raise pigs for the warrior orcs to eat when they get home! The fact that many other fantasy media tend to also portray orc as 'pig-men' also makes this hilarious. The flavour for the effect is that the Orcish Farmer is so dirty that any land he works in 'turns into a pigpen'... i.e., a Swamp. That's neat! Ice Age actually has a lot of this where we get a bunch of cards that work alongside their 'ally' colours. Red's ally colours are Black and Green, which is why Orcish Lumberjack has synergy with Green, and Orcish Farmer here has synergy with Black! 

We do have a handful more orcs and cool beasts, but I don't have quite as much to say about them. Instead, we'll close this off with the Curse of Marit Lage. Marit Lage is an ancient evil described in this card and another one in Blue (Wrath of Marit Lage), though we won't get to see that elder evil until much later. There's quite a bit of a Lovecraftian vibe to the oceanic creature Marit Lage, and the Curse of Marit Lage prevents all islands from untapping. But the artwork is... quite surreal, isn't it? It's a bunch of sea creatures, with that one saw-shark and weedy seadragon being quite prominent. Are those the oceanic creatures that are swimming around Marit Lage's tomb? 

White now! And I'm just going to say this outright... we'll not have a lot of creatures here, which is going to be disproportionately obvious since Ice Age is a bigger block. But in these review rewrites, I really do want to make it so that I'll talk only about the things that I have something to talk about in the main part of the article.

Kjeldoran Skyknight is quite cool, because he's a knight riding a giant bird! He's even wielding a really huge lance! Apparently Kjeldor has an air force of giant eagles called Aesthirs.

Kjeldoran Elite Guard isn't riding an Aesthir. He's just some guy cosplaying Marvel comics' Thor... but with two GINORMOUS ear-wings. I like the flavour text noting that those winged helmets are taken off in actual war, and are only worn for pageants. That's cute. 

Adarkar Unicorn is quite a lovely piece of artwork, with the unicorn trudging through the snow, and quite literally melding into the night, starry sky. It's actually quite beautiful! I'm a huge fan. It's a shame that the card itself merely generates a measly 1-2 mana to pay for your cumulative upkeep cards, which isn't going to matter much within a couple of turns. Pretty card, though!

As a result of multiple expansions being worked on at the same time, the whole 'Legend' concept did not penetrate the other MTG expansions as much as Legends did. But Ice Age has a couple of legendary creatures, like General Jarkeld, whose name has been showing up a lot in White and Blue's flavour text. And... it's a bit odd that his legendary card shows him seemingly bound by hostiles and crying? I skimmed through all the cards in this set, and none of them offer an explanation to this. But just like Karplusan Yeti above, I think this is simply a product of early MTG where some of the card artwork don't quite have the main creature it's supposed to be depicting in the main focus. 

The Seraph are one of the most powerful types of angels in biblical mythology. MTG's Seraph... reminds me of Mary Poppins? She's a mere 4/4, but she's also got a rather powerful mind-control effect, temporarily resurrecting a creature she personally slew, and having that creature fight for you as long as she's around. 

Snow Hound is our very first DOG! DOG DOG DOG DOG! A big good boy St. Bernard-esque breed that's looking over his master, the Snow Hound is a good, good boy. MTG would waffle back and forth on "dog" versus "hound" as the creature type to call these domesticated canines... which makes absolute sense, since 'hound' is just a sub-type of dogs. Interestingly, other canine mammals like wolves, jackals and foxes all have their own creature types. But tigers, panthers, lions, smilodons, and cat-people are all under the umbrella of "Cat". 

A sign and a reminder that White creatures will be quite cool in the future is Blinking Spirit. Yes, White is more than just knights, clerics and the odd angel or pegasus. We've got this very cool thing! This Spirit has got four wings, a snake-like body, two 'arms' and a head made up of only light. Absolutely strange, and it looks quite alien -- it looks almost part of this world, but definitely not natural; which I think feels quite in tune with what a 'spirit' should be. And it looks 'good', right? At least, it doesn't look like it's going to harm you for no reason. 

Love the little goblin flavour text. "Don't look at it! Maybe it'll go away!" Indeed, the Blinking Spirit's ability is being 'blinked' back to the owner's hand for no cost.

That's not quite the end of creatures, since we have multi-colour cards. Previously I had included the multi-coloured cards randomly as I talked about the colours, but there are enough for me to talk about them on their own, I feel, and I'll just make it clear what the colour identities are... Kjeldoran Frostbeast is a giant lurking ice-frost elemental bursting out of a frozen lake. Very cool giant claws and fangs, and the fantasy is that it has an aura that's so dangerous that it destroys everything fighting it; essentially Deathtouch. I get that the nature-elemental is Green, but I'm not sure about the 'White' part. Even early on I feel MTG has a great grasp on single-colour identity, but not so much on multi-coloured ones. 

Giant Trap Door Spider is a nice adaptation of the real-world creature, and is one of the very few spiders in all of MTG to not have Reach. Which makes sense, since instead of creating webs in trees, trap-door spiders hunt terrestrial bugs. Only since this is a giant trap door spider, it eats people instead. Being Green makes sense, since it's an animal, but a creature built around creating traps feels an ill fit for aggressive red. The effect has the Giant Trap Door Spider remove itself and its target from play, not only representing it catching and dragging the victim away but also eating it. 

Skeleton Ship is a LEGENDARY skeleton. Let me repeat it again. This ship is a legendary creature. There is only one of this thing, and it's not considered a ship, it's never errata'd into a vehicle, it's a skeleton first and foremost. Glorious. All the characters that are mentioned and talked about in Ice Age, and one of the four legendary creatures we get is the Skeleton Ship. 

The ship itself is quite all right. It is presumably made out of bone, based on its name. Like basically all ships and vehicular-adjacent things before it, MTG's various development team doesn't have a consistent way of depicting vehicles as either Artifacts or Creatures until much later. But I would like to also note that in the background, there are human skeletons sitting on sea turtles and seemingly flying. Evil necromantic skeletons these may be, but the Skeleton Ship is having fun. 

Most of the artifact creatures are some variation of golem, but the Walking Wall is a cool wall artifact! It's a bit hard to see what's going on, but parts of the walls are breaking off and forming into like, giant crab-legs or something. But from afar the giant moving parts look like they're just chunks of the long wall. Pretty neat! The effect translates to pumping mana to give the wall power and the ability to attack for a turn. 

Soldevi Golem barely made it into this. I do like the artwork, with a grungy robot with a mace at the end of one arm. I don't mind these kind of 'Constructs' and 'Golems' in fantasy settings if they're shown to be at least a couple of distance removed from our current level of technology, y'know? The Soldevi Golem does not untap properly, and you need to spend a cost to have it untap properly. Why? Well, the artwork shows why -- it's removing its own giant clockwork from its back! No! Bad Soldevi Golem! Bad! Put it back!

One of the more infamous artifacts from this age is Jester's Cap, which, in addition to having a really mischievous-looking guy on the artwork, also has the effect of looking for specific cards in your opponent's deck to exile them. Assholish disruption at its finest!

And that's it for the 'main' part of the article, now for the rest of the cards!

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