Written by Jonathan Wojcik
Horror Token by Pete Venters
You're reading the first of several Magic: The Gathering creature type reviews on Bogleech! The HORRORS (like I'm really going to use that as a noun in only lowercase) are a big favorite of mine with an interesting history; in the mid 90's, paranoid religious watchdogs were still taken just seriously enough that when Magic was criticized for including "demons" in its mythical fantasy setting, publisher Wizards of the Coast complied by banishing all devilish imagery from subsequent expansion sets, leaving a villainous void soon filled by the HORRORS - creatures more Lovecraftian than Luciferian, trading cloven hooves and flaming horns for squirming tentacles and bulbous eyeballs. For once, pressure from religious parents had done something positive.
Phyrexian Boon by Mark Tedin
By the time it was safe to slowly re-introduce "Demons," (read: people were too busy burning Harry Potter books to still care about pieces of cardboard) the HORRORS had already established themselves as something entirely different, and the two categories have continued to coexist. HORRORS have no unifying origin, motivations or theme. They're simply things so alien, so unnatural, so ghastly and unpleasant that there's just nothing else you can call them. They're just HORRORS, alright? Magical taxonomy works a little different.
The Guiltfeeder
Illustrator: Mark Tedin
I'm not going in any real order, so let's just start out with the Guiltfeeder. It's an excellent design, roughly octopoid without looking too conventional; the limbs twisting together into two long, stilt-like legs is extra creepy, and I like how its lips all converge into a single tentacle without completely obscuring its nasty, toothy mouth. It's easy to miss how a tendril is completely passing through that guy's head, and he doesn't feel a thing. He probably deserves it. He looks like a real crybaby about whatever it is the Guiltfeeder is dredging up. There's a whole story there, somewhere. I'm sure he back-stabbed someone pretty fierce.
The Dread Slag
Illustrator: Anthony S. Waters
I should mention, for the non-fans, that most Magic cards come in one of five thematic colors, and almost every single HORROR is a "black" card, the color of everything dark and goth and gloomy. Dread Slag is a partial exception, being a "multicolor" card combining black with red, the color of fiery chaos and war.
The Dread Slag is conceptually "an amalgam of phobias," according to Wizards.com, which I suppose explains its design. I guess there are certain people, in certain circles, who might be afraid of a gigantic spider-termite-snake of mutilated human remains, and at least one guy really terrified of fanged croissants.
The Void Maw
Illustrator: E.M. Gist
With its sad, beady eyes and button nose, I feel like this HORROR is just a big puppy dog at heart, even if its very feeding process perverts the laws of physics; normally, a "dead" creature card goes to the graveyard pile, from which many other cards can eventually retrieve it, but with a Void Maw in play, dead creatures skip the graveyard and get removed from the entire game, as though utterly annihilated by the Void Maw's...void maw.
Fortunately, you can put these banished creatures (preferably only your own) back in a proper graveyard to give Void Maw a temporary power boost, so I guess it eats things clear out of existence only to poop their corpses back into reality. Void Maw, you are darling.
The Cursed Monstrosity
Illustrator: Jeff Remmer
This poor thing actually dies if a spell of any sort is cast on it, even a harmless one, unless you discard a precious land card from your hand. I'm not sure what that's really supposed to signify, but I know what I like, and what I like are eyeless, naked moles with one useless bat wing and giant hairy spores floating around everywhere for some reason. We've all got our quirks.
The Vebulid
Illustrator: Ron Spencer
This beautiful, polypous abomination is apparently a weapon of Phyrexia, a sort of bio-technological hell which many of the game's foulest creatures call home. This tripodial bag of guts (notice the third limb in the background) grows in strength every turn, but dies once it attacks, implying some sort of kamikaze balloon-tumor that I always assumed exploded, or at least burst open in some torrent of corrosive bile. And that guy's going to hit it with a stick. Haha, do it.
The Witch Engine
Illustrator: Mark Nelson
Another product of Phyrexia, this eyeless, hairy bag of bird bones suits the words "Witch Engine" about as perfectly as you could ask for, and would look right at home in Jim Henson's The Dark Crystal. Capable of generating black mana (what you spend to play or "cast" black cards in the first place) it's implied that these are essentially mass produced sorcerors of the Phyrexian army, even appearing on a number of other spell cards in the same set:
"Pestilence" by Pete Venters
Maybe it's just me, but don't they look just so happy here? There's just something about the way they're striding through those fields of writhing bodies, like big, happy chickens. No?
"Contamination" by Stephen Daniele
The Kederekt Creeper
Illustrator: Mark Hyzer
Another multicolored card, the Kederekt Creeper is a being of black, red and blue mana, Magic's color of air, water, order and the mind. A weird combination and a weird, weird creature. I love the crusty, scabby skin and distended baby-arms. The whole thing is "bloated with venom" according to its text, and really gets that across with its design alone. One look at the creeper, and you know that it's not only bloated with something, but that something is probably detrimental to your health.
The Tangle Angler
Illustrator: Igor Kieryluk
In addition to multicolor monstrosities, recent expansions have introduced the rather novel concept of entirely non-black HORRORS, like this Tangle Angler, a "green" creature card. Green, if you haven't guessed, is the color of good old mother nature, which we all know is no stranger to mind-bending abominations anyway. I love the Tangle Angler's big, ungainly fish-face on such a weird body, with what seem to be eyeballs lining its gnarled legs.
The Thrummingbird
Illustrator: Efrem Palacios
A pure blue-mana "Bird HORROR," this could very well be the cutest little thing ever corrupted by Phyrexia's pandimensional contaminants. I know it's just as likely part of the digestive system, but my mind wants to interpret that orange globe as its eye, a very interesting place for one to be. I wonder what you put in a Thrummingbird feeder? Maybe you just string up a whole baby and call it a day.
The Psychosis Crawler
Illustrator: Stephan Martiniere
Even stranger than a nonblack HORROR, Psychosis Crawler is a colorless Artifact Creature, and I do believe it's Magic's first disembodied brain in a walking robotic canister. It was about damn time. This is literally what I've aspired to be in my old age since I was four years old.
What's nice about this design is how mechanical it looks from a distance, but how biological it is up close. The legs even look like they're made out of alligators, in addition to having a set of teeth and gums under its brain-tank!
The Delraich
Illustrator: Todd Lockwood
This is a pretty nice one, with its featureless dome head and yonic, alien stomach-mouth. It's like David Cronenberg's whole career got up and walked away, and the little screaming faces of absorbed souls are just the sprinkles on the cupcake.
The Nihilith
Illustrator: Dave Allsop
I love the concept of this illustration, showing only the meaty, green-eyed lower tentacles of a much larger entity whose face is left completely up to our imagination, if it even has one. Those tentacles seem to be covered in eyes of their own, and who knows if it has eyes, or mouths, or any sensory organs anywhere else.
The Faceless Butcher
Illustrator: Daren Bader
Anything that lives up to the name "Faceless Butcher" is going to be awesome, there's just no way around it, and this one really goes the extra mile with its asymmetrical chopping limbs and tentacle centipede body. I'm not sure whether it actually does have a face - with about a dozen little spider-eyes - or what seems to be a "mouth" here is just its gaping, hollow upper abdominal cavity. Perhaps it has to chop things up and just drop the cuts inside.
The Nemesis of Reason
Illustrator: Mark Tedin
Nemesis. Of Reason. I'll forego the cheap political jokes I could make here and move on to the NEMESIS OF REASON'S creature type, which isn't just "HORROR," but "LEVIATHAN HORROR." Its card includes the text "Words describing it fail. Pages relating it shrivel. Tales recounting it end."
It's one giant multi-layered cake of ridiculous, but if only one monster could get away with playing all this straight, I think it's exactly the one that we're looking at here. I love the "mane" of tentacles, giving it a touch of deformed equine, the eyes situated on that little knob of a cranium and especially how its lips trail off into even more tentacles. The appendage tearing itself against the jagged rock in the foreground is also a nice extra touch of nastiness, too.
The Plague Spitter
Illustrator: Chippy
A little back down to Earth, the roly-poly Plague Spitter somehow strongly reminds me of a guinea pig, even though Chippy was probably aiming more for "engorged tick." I also used to interpret those three tiny holes as its eyes, and the white face-plate as a goofy nose, but now I'm pretty sure those are breathing pores and an angry, bony little mask. I'm not sure if spewing flies from a series of dorsal vents can be considered "spitting," and in fact, I had a hard time finding this card when I remembered it as "Plague Spewer." I don't know why I'm picking it apart so much; spitter or spewer, pug-nose or skull head, it's a cool and charming little whosamabob.
The Sewer Nemesis
Illustrator: Nils Hamm
At first glance, this looks like little more than a hulking, headless mass of septic sludge with one penetrating, lidless eyeball, and that would be more than enough to make my MVP list, but on closer inspection, the Sewer Nemesis is actually comprised largely of rats, their adorable little bodies hideously melding together just to form this thing's all-too-human arms! It's probably not all rats, sure, but almost everything we can clearly make out is rats. Rats upon rats, like adorable, hairy, sewage-smeared legos, with that wonderful haunting eye completing the picture like the cherry on a sewage and rat birthday cake.
The Skittering Horror/Monstrosity
Illustrator: Mark Zug
There are at least three or four completely different "faces" you can get out of this thing, though its true eyes might be just above its lolling tongue, beady and blue. I love how little it resembles anything else I can think of, with such an elaborately shaped yellow "mask" over a fuzzy, round, black body with a serpentine tail and buggy legs. Besides looking really, really cool, it doesn't do much other than immediately die when you play any other creature, hence the card's flavor text: "This monstrosity will do...for now."
Illustrator: Rk Post
The Skittering Horror would have remained just another one-off weirdo if not for the Time Spiral expansion, seven years later, which was packed with in-jokes and callbacks to older cards both infamous and obscure. Skittering Monstrosity is just a negligibly stronger version of its predecessor, but with a rather more menacing face-plate. I really like the little, purple eyes placed behind the false "sockets" of its bony mask. It's also a mommy!
The Creakwood Liege
Illustrator: Cole Eastburn
Half a decade after writing this review, I've returned to it to inject a load more horrors right before we end with my all-time favorites again, and one of the newest horrors I've deemed worthy is this wonderful bi-color beast. Not to be confused with the multicolored cards - which require several types of mana to deploy - this is a card that you can pay for with either all black, all green, or a mix of the two mana types.
Creakwood Liege looks almost dragon-like, but the whispy spindliness of its appendages and needly, plier-like jaws appeal to me pretty strongly. More importantly, it's a card that generates another creature each and every single turn - a "worm token!" It makes worms!!
The Abyssal Gatekeeper
Illustrator: Mark Tedin
This wasn't originally printed as a "horror," but has since been rebranded as one, and was actually one of my favorite creatures back in the day. I just really liked this long-tailed, monstrois insectoid who fits perfectly into this gateway, even if it does have a distracting human-like face. It's similar to face of the villain, Volrath, who supposedly employs it, so I guess it's just a matter of brand recognition and your own abyssal gatekeeper would presumably have your face on it too.
The Devouring Strossus
Illustrator: D. Alexander Gregory
I almost added this one before, but thought I needed to keep this page shorter and simpler at the time. This powerful black-mana monster is an interesting horror more for the fact that it's not especially weird or grotesque, just a huge armored humanoid with tattered wings, glowing red eyes and a gas-mask looking face, but it's interesting that such a thing is a "horror" and also "devours" other creatures. How? It's got a hose where its mouth should be. Where does it put its food??? Perhaps that's where the "horror" comes in, and we're all best off not knowing.
The Dark Hatchling
Illustrator: Mark Nelson
I remember this card coming out in a set PACKED full of horrors I was very excited to see after reading a text-only spoiler list, and the dark hatchling did not disappoint with its beautiful colors and fang-covered mouth parts, that lower lip quite similar to a real-world hagfish.
The hatchling automatically kills a non-black enemy creature when it comes into play, so you can have all sorts of chestburster fun with a couple of them in your deck. Moreso if you've got a deck that allows you to return cards to your hand, retrieve them from your graveyard, or otherwise play the same creature card more than once!
The Spined Fluke
Illustrator: Mark Nelson
To child-me's delight, the same exact set included not only the dark hatchling, but another wormlike parasitic horror by the same artist. This one requires you to kill one of your own creatures to bring it into play, but it's a pretty decent monster. It has only one health, but five attack, and the ability to regenerate from death for only a single black mana. It's also a lovely design, and how often do you even see fluke-based monsters at all?!
The Eater of the Dead
Illustrator: Jesper Myrfors
This was actually a celebrated, classic monster way back when, its only ability being that it can untap if you remove a dead creature from the game. This means you can not only eliminate an opponent's ability to resurrect any of their creatures, but free up the Eater to defend you during the opponent's turn.
But, who cares. What I'm interested in is what the hell we're looking at here. We've got a dog-like demon face, bleeding eyes on its "chest," membranous wings to either side, shoulder tentacles, a pair of tooth-lined scaly appendages near the bottom of the illustration and a pair of human skulls in the corners. How are all these things connected, and what does the rest of it even look like? More confusing are those clawed, finger-like growths to either side of the dog face. I always interpreted these as little hands clawing their way out of the surrounding flesh, as if what we're actually seeing is a smaller dog-like creature emerging from a bigger, weirder demon-bat. I really have no idea.
The Abyssal Horror
Illustrator: Rk Post
I always thought the stretched-out humanlike face on the front of this thing was a tad cheesy, but its own flavor text says that it simply wears the face of its most recent victim. Without that mask, its anterior is more like a featureless, fleshy walnut with bony bat-ears, which I love, and it also has an entire naked, mutant bird for a shoulder, which I also love. A third thing I love is the arm ending in an eyeball suspended in a ring, and let's also not forget about the dead beetle it wears like a pendant. There's just...a lot going on here.
The Undergrowth Scavenger
Illustrator: Nils Hamm
Just gorgeous! This is a green-mana FUNGUS HORROR, and its stats end up equalling the number of creature cards in all player's graveyards. What a wonderfully mucky, nasty face on this thing, eerily pale flesh with frog-like hands and lovely little glowing eyes.
The Gitrog Monster
Illustrator: Jason Kang
There's little we can say about the design here, but I love that this LEGENDARY horror is just a big frog, and named as if it's some kind of local cryptozoological legend, which is kind of exactly what it is, complete with a short horror story to enjoy, though it's always kind of silly when a magical setting packed full of demons, spirits, ghosts, angels, golems and dragons still has "mythical" beasts that some people don't really believe in.
A big frog? Seriously? That's what you're skeptical about, Mia?
The Sinuous Vermin
Illustrator: Jason Kang
GOD this is cool, and our second horror associated with sewer rats! This one actually gets "rat horror" as its typing, too, and its gimmick is that you can play it as a simple 2/2 creature for two mana, but spend another five mana at any time to make it "monstrous," which boosts it up to 5/5 and adds the "menace" ability, which means it can only be blocked by two or more creatures at once.
I love how we have an ordinary little rat illuminated by the moonlight, but its tail becomes the tentacle of a big, squirming mass behind it.
The Urborg Mindsucker
Illustrator: Tony Diterlizzi
When this card first debuted - originally just as a "mindsucker" creature type rather than a horror - it instantly became my second or third favorite creature design in Magic. You could argue that it's nothing but a knockoff of the Illithids or "Mind Flayers" from Dungeons and Dragons, but I think the two are as different as night and day. The mindsucker has that lovely hunchback, for one, and covered in bug-like hairs, a combination of features I simply COULD NOT get out of my head.
It also has much more than just a bunch of tentacles for a mouth. It has those elaborate , bizarre lips and a sharp tongue that remind me of a tick's mouthparts, its tentacles more like an array of sensitive feelers. It looks a lot like it could retract the tendrils and lips alike into a much shorter, rounder face, and the whole thing always gave me a weird sort of flea-like impression, somehow.
The Ridged Kusite
Illustrator: Gary Leach
When we first met the Ridged Kusite, it wasn't even a creature card - just some nameless, ectoplasmic bog-monster on a card called Guided Strike. This beautifully bug-eyed design really stuck with me, however, and I must not have been the only one, because it was eventually honored with a card of its own in the aforementioned Time Spiral series:
Illustrator: Rk Post
The official "Ridged Kusite" is slightly modified from the original, with smaller, yet freakier eyes, a tentacle nose above a toothier maw and a more substantial body - overall like a cross between a tardigrade and opabinia, a win/win if there ever was one. I loved the original's solid high-beam eyes, but I also love that veiny lattice we can see on this one's dimmer peepers. If you were wondering what a "Kusite" is, Ridged Kusite is just an anagram of Guided Strike.
The Krovikan Horror
Illustrator: Christopher Rush
I'm going to end this with the very first HORROR I ever owned, because I'm the kind of person who would clearly remember that. Possibly more clearly than how I lost my virginity (honest, that did happen at some point). This card could directly damage your opponent by sacrificing your own creatures, but there's no telling which step of this process is happening here. Is it draining that poor bastard of power, or doling it out?
Whatever the case, I remember thinking this was hands down the most fascinating design I'd ever seen, and it's still pretty high up there. I want to say it calls to mind the best aspects of arthropod, annelid and mollusk, but Vicky (I'm going to call a magic card Vicky now. Sorry) truly looks like nothing of this Earth. I love those weird "exhaust pipes" on her (now it's a her, too!) back, and a face so inhuman I still don't know if she's supposed to have eyes. It's just the icing on the gelatinous, undulating cake that the entire entity is utterly transparent, like some deep sea pteropod.
I just wish I'd thought to actually ask Christopher Rush about those eyes while I still could. As of only 2016, Rush is no longer with us. Consider taking a look at all 118 Magic cards he illustrated in his lifetime.