ENTRY 004: THOUGHT-O-TROPHS

Mark Tedin's Thoughtleech was another of my favorite designs from the early days. Look at that thing! It has a sort of brainy-textured trunk with a hooked stinger on its wrinkly, saclike abdomen, which it's plunging into the back of some guy's skull. There's a single pair of clawed, two-toed bony arms, and these hook into the host's ear canals. It has tiny, froggy looking eyes on short stalks, just before a fleshy arrow-shaped head end like that of a squid, and the tip of this splits into two very long multi-jointed fingers that are entering the host's mouth. A wonderfully alien design that evokes a bit of Arthropod and a bit Cephalopod, but not exactly either of them, but it certainly does look exactly like the kind of creature that would suck on your brain.

Unfortunately, Thoughtleech isn't a creature card, and it isn't all that useful a card either, simply giving you 1 life every time an opponent taps an island. If you're not facing a deck that uses blue, it's all but useless, not unlike my friend the Spinal Villain - who almost does feel distantly related to this organism.

Fortunately, the Odyssey set in 2001 brought us a new head-sucking, thought-consuming weirdo that was a creature card, and always felt to me like a sort of spiritual successor or loose reference to the thoughtleech. Thought Nibbler, a blue card, is a 1/1 flying "beast" for just one mana, which is a pretty good deal, except that it reduces your own hand size. A fascinatingly absurd design by Arnie Swekel, though, presenting a real challenge to actually describe. Let's try!

The top of the Thought Nibbler is a chitinous looking spiny shell. At the front of the shell are two thin fingerlike legs ending in needle-sharp little claws, and a pair of tentacular appendages which a pretty novel anatomical orientation; not a pair of tentacles protruding from the creature the way you'd expect, but imagine two snakes or eels glued to the front of the carapace by their sides, so each tentacle has two free ends, I guess? the front ends of these appendages are embedded into the head of the human host, and their opposite ends are going into the fool's ears.

The rest of the creature hangs off the back of the host's cranium: beneath the carapace is wrinkled, pale grey flesh with one of presumably two beady, pale blue eyes, and a pair of batlike wings sprout from the back of this greyish lump. Beneath this is a comical row of what look like rotten, yellow teeth protruding upward from purple gums, like an underbite, and below that is a lower lip and a rounded, warty, pinkish saclike "body."

It's every bit as otherworldly and taxonomically foreign as the Thoughtleech, but the humanlike teeth and gums give it a dash of more psychedelic whimsy that puts me in the mind of Ghostbusters. I can't even quite picture how it looks detached from a human head; what ARE those double-ended face tentacle things? How deep are they penetrating the victim's scalp?!

Thought Nibbler is not alone, though; it's part of a trio! Each just has an additional point of offense and defense, costs an additional mana, and of course reduces your hand by one more card. The first of these "upgrades"(?) is Thought Eater, a name shared with one of my favorite old school Dungeons and Dragons monsters! Luca Zontini illustrates this as a scaly, segmented worm-snake with clawed forelegs and a large, ghoulish looking head, somewhere between human skull and lizard with sinister, solid orange eyes, a humanlike nose and lipless jaws. Its tail branches into multiple tendrils, and two of these are plunging into a wizard's forehead.

It's a cool design with personality, though I have to say, if it "eats thoughts" through the tail, I'm not sure why it has such a conventional mouth as well. Maybe if it was the tongue that was splitting into brain-drilling tentacles?

Last is Jim Nelson's Thought Devourer, and it's still not as strange as the Nibbler, but it does feel sort of distantly related with its fleshy, blobby, gloopy looking pink, purple and blue flesh! Shaped like a grotesque, tumorous jellyfish, it has dozens of long, ropy blue-purple claw-tipped tentacles, one of which is completely wrapping around the host while another begins digging into the top of his head. The Devourer also appears to have a round sphincter-like mouth opening on its underside, ringed with teeth, and a rather small cluster of just four shiny, black close-set eyes in a diamond shaped arrangement. We can't tell if we're seeing the front of its "face" or if there might be additional sets of eyes facing away from us; personally I like thinking of this view as its face.

I do like all three of these, but I'd have to rank them Nibbler > Devourer > Eater. If we also include Thoughtleech in the equation, I'm really not sure if I like it or the Nibbler more. I guess it might be a tie!

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