ENTRY 002: HYALOPTEROUS LEMURE

The very day I ever got into this game, Ice Age was brand new, and a local comic store had thousands upon thousands of loose, cheap cards in dozens of cardboard bins. Still barely understanding the game, my mother and I simply browsed through them for any with interesting enough artwork, and after digging through so many repetitive zombies, skeletons and ghosties among the black cards, I was delighted to suddenly pull out this adorable little gremlin; a pale grey, shaggy looking tarsier with hooked clawed on its hind limbs and veiny, insectlike wings. An impressive 4/3 makes it deadlier and more resilient than the average human, with the added ability to trade a point of offense if it wants to be able to fly for a turn.

Then there's the funny flavor text; "The Lemures looked harmless, until they descended on my troops. Within moments, only bones remained."

As some of you may know, "lemure" with an "e" on the end is a term for a restless spirit, specifically one that hasn't been given a proper burial. More of you, however, are familiar with "lemurs," as in the old school primates, originally so named because their large eyes were so eerie at night. This card was intended to be a ghoulish phantasm of some sort, but illustrator Richard Thomas was only aware of the animal, and the "error" resulted in an obviously much more entertaining, much more original monster. So much so, I'm truly surprised that the game didn't run with the idea of an ironically cute-but-deadly "lemure" as a black-mana creature type. It's always stood out to me as another iconic card, and it's the kind of concept people always have a lot of fun with, isn't it?

Alas, as far as I'm aware, Wizards of the Coast only ever saw this as a communication error that was too late to undo, rather than a fun new piece of unexpected worldbuilding.

Eleven years later, in Time Spiral, a new card would at least call back to the little guy in a cute way: Viscid Lemures, which actually are depicted as wretched human souls, inky and semifluid in form. The card has the same cost, stats, and almost the same ability as the wee bushbaby, trading "flying" for "swampwalk," and the now even funnier flavor text "Lemurs? Is that all? Finally, something harmless..."

So, obviously I think it was a total mistake to reprint the Hyalopterous lemure in a "corrected" form. The artwork by Pavel Kolomeyets is cool as hell, yes, a monstrous skeletal figure formed of wispy electric-blue ectoplasm, but I thought the original "mistake" had long been embraced by now, and any reprints of the card would either keep the original art or just bring us a new take on the same lovably murderous ball of fluff. "I was wrong! Not harmless at all!" is still funny, credited to the same guy as on the Viscid Lemures, but would have still been funnier on the other kind of "lemur" again.

Better yet, they could have done thing where the lemur spelling always refers to ghosts, and the lemure spelling always refers to the hairy little forest imps. There's just a lot more fun we could have had with this one, now squandered!

PREVIOUS: