ENTRY 005: HELLIONS

The artificial plane of Rath (the coolest thing ever introduced by this game at the time) was largely constructed of a strange substance called flowstone, as shapeless as a liquid but as solid to the touch as cold rock...and occasionally forming into weird facsimiles of living creatures. One of these was known as the Flowstone Hellion, illustrated by Daren Bader, an awesome looking serpentine worm lined with tiny caterpillary legs and armed with many whiplike, blade-tipped tentacles around its circular maw. I especially love how its Flowstone "skin" is still incomplete in places, and the slightly disorganized placement of the tentacles sprouting from different layers of its pseudo-tissues. Originally printed with only the "beast" creature type, it was seemingly something that existed only in the context of the Flowstone, among others like the Flowstone Shambler.

But either the Flowstone-flavor Hellion was meant as just a preview, or someone at Wizards fell quickly in love with the concept, since two more would crop up within a year. Crater Hellion, also by Bader, appears to dwell in the mouths of active volcanoes. Its magma skin has a beautiful giraffe-like reticulation to it, the bases of its six tentacles are webbed, and the mouth has six claw-tipped fingers alternating with small, hooked fangs. Iron-barb Hellion, meanwhile, appears to be a fully organic creature with deep black skin, a more lamprey-like rasping mouth with many rings of teeth, and tentacles that look almost exactly like biological barbed wire.

The idea of a giant, eyeless killer worm was of course nothing new, and a monstrous worm with a sucker mouth and tentacles on its head wasn't all that radical as a creature design either. Magic even already had gigantic, hungry "Wurms" as a core creature type, which ranged from reptilian to invertebrate designs, usually but not always tied to Green Mana, and no one would have questioned it if these three had been printed as Wurms all along.

All three, however, are pure Red Mana monsters - the "destructive chaos" color - and the naming convention fills in the rest. In case your first language doesn't have the word "hellion," it's kind of an old-fashioned casual insult for a person whose behavior is completely out of control, like a violent punk or a tantruming children. So what we have here is evidently a kind of creature just SO aggressively wild and berserk that, in a fantastical multiverse already teeming with terrifying monstrosities, this particular kind of monstrosity warranted the designation of "hellion" as a basic animal name. It's the exact, platonic opposite of our world having a creature with such naturally chill vibes, someone took one look at it and just thought "sloth." Or maybe "hellion" began as the name of a kind of creature in this setting, but undoubtedly carries the same connotations as slang? Imagine how big of a pain in the ass you'd have to be for some elvish druid to compare you to one of these things:

The development team knew they had something iconic on their hands, and Hellions have long since cemented themselves as a proper creature type. We still don't know much about them, beyond the fact that they're a form of life deeply tied to red mana in some fundamental, primal way, but I'd say they're as unique to Magic the Gathering as Beholders are to Dungeons and Dragons or Malboros to Final Fantasy, all of which are also pretty "basic" monster designs given memorable personality by just the right framing and worldbuilding.

Hellions really came into their own once they received their first Legendary, the incredibly cool Ulasht, the Hateseed, which is a Hellion Hydra! How terrifying a concept is that?! And the illustration is just gorgeous, with all those irregularly branching heads flailing up into the stark lighting of the backdrop, like you're looking up at something just titanic. It even seems to borrow from the original Flowstone Hellion, with the overlapping striated flesh down its body, and interspaces extra long oral tentacles with exceptionally sharp and spidery finger-claws. Not to mention, this half-green-mana Hellion generates saprolings! My favorite little fungoid babies!

Ulasht enjoyed a full ten long years as the only Hellion "character" in the canon, but Thromok the Insatiable would show up in 2016, another red/green Hellion, distinguished by its massive appetite and unusual lack of tentacles, possessing only an arrangement of many knifelike mandibles more akin to your typical sci-fi "sandworm."

Then, in 2020, we would get Obosh the Preypiercer, the first red/black Hellion and part "Horror" type. Covered in sharp-edged metallic plating, Obosh also lacks tentacles, but has many-jointed arthropod legs sprouting from its entire length. It's also the first Hellion with mouth on the "front" of a "head," rather than a mouth as the abrupt end of a tubular form, and I'm pretty sure it's the first Hellion with any eyes whatsoever, having what appear to be many tiny ocelli scattered around its many-fanged maw. What's next for Hellions? More hybrids, maybe? A Hellion Spirit? Hellion Zombie? I feel like a Hellion Dragon is an obvious step to take someday, but then again, a world that even evolves a Hellion Dragon might not be a world that lasts a whole lot longer.

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