ENTRY 01: An Introduction and Our First Creature!

I have a painful relationship with Magic: The Gathering, and while I've kept up with its released over the years, I've still never gotten completely "back into it" since losing a collection that, since I last told this story, has probably already accrued another forty billion trillion dollars in value, and I last told that story only earlier this year when I shared an original setting idea, so this intro is the last time, I swear, no matter how much longer I'm going to wonder in what mystery landfill my Sliver Queen, Gaea's Cradle and several hundred other vintage rarities are decomposing. I at least hope there's a happy enough family of silverfish putting them to good use.

Since I last "really played" in my teens, however, the game has been practically begging and pleading for me to come back. In the nearly 20 years since my original decks evaporated, the whole scene was taken over by an entirely new play style - Commander - which has you playing a longer, more strategic game with a bigger, more diverse deck and one legendary creature as your Big Boss, which is all exactly how I would have rather played the game from day one. And if I did make a Commander deck, you would not even believe the legal Big Boss Creature options that seem almost uncannily made for me specifically.

There's a tiny, world-destroying insect swarm goddess who builds herself a bigger body out of corpses and more insects. There's an ancient, evil slug that turns people into other slugs. And now, there's a mad psychic rat who lives in symbiosis with parasitized zombie snails. LEUCOCHLORIDIUM! In MY magic the gathering cards!? It's more likely than you think! The only problem now is that your entire Commander deck is limited to the mana colors of the Commander themselves, and I'm the kind of person who likes to focus on a single "main" in any kind of game that gives you multiple character options. You can't make a commander deck with any of these and still use the other two, and no, I'm not going to make someone else with all five colors as my Main One just so I can use all three of these, that's cheap! I don't know if that dilemma is why I still haven't actually made a commander deck yet, but if anything should be the final, ultimate push for me to really, seriously collect and play this game ever again, it's probably going to have to be Duskmourn.

Duskmourn released on September 27, 2024, just days before I started this review series, which also means just days before October. That's kind of a normal release schedule for Magic, only this time it's appropriate. And sure, the game has seen multiple settings and storylines with spooky ghouls and gothic motifs - occasionally all thanks to those rascally Phyrexians - but Duskmourn: House of Horror is Magic's most horror-focused set of all time, blending notes you might recognize from Stephen King novels, Junji Ito manga, 80's monster movies, urban legends and creepypasta with enough original elements to feel fresher and cool than the sum of its parts...though I have to admit, some aspects of it even feel so close to settings and stories of my own that it almost feels a little like Magic "beat me to them," in a silly way that my mind is definitely exaggerating.

As has been the game's tradition for some time now, the name of the set is also the name of the setting: Duskmourn is a house of horror, yes, but every Magic set showcases an entire plane of its multiplanar reality, a whole "universe in its multiverse," focusing in on an entire world's worth of creatures, characters and exotic locales. So, like the Backrooms or House of Leaves or noisy tenant, Duskmourn is so much bigger on the inside, there isn't even any "outside" left in the same dimension. It's a demonically possessed manor that's "eaten" the entire surrounding plane, and as you might have guessed, it's still hungry! Greedy!!!

An official guide to Duskmourn's different environments is HERE, and they also built up to its release with an episodic story collected all in one place HERE, though we'll probably touch on some of these details as I spend an entire month reviewing my favorites of its creatures and entities, beginning with the very first one I ever saw previewed:

FEAR OF LOST TEETH

Also known as Doctor Dementist's estranged wife, this card by itself still feels like the perfect introduction to what Duskmourn's all about, not just because of its concept and design, but the presence of something that resembles a dental office from our own world, in our own timeline. Magic only recently began to mix in more recognizable "modern" visuals in select, thematically appropriate sets, probably to mixed reception I'll wager, but I think it's cool, and I think it's especially important to ground "horror" in things the audience might cross paths with for realsies.

As a manifestation of tooth-related anxieties, this is a great looking entity! It has a body shaped like an entire human lower jaw, with overgrown clusters of teeth in the process of detachig and floating away, dangling their nerve endings like horrible little balloons! EUGH! It walks on multiple grey, wet and clammy looking human arms with bloodstained hands, which are attached "backwards" in an interesting little touch, and it seems like the whole dental surgery floor might be an extension of this manifestation, the way the ceiling lights are framing it in their own ghostly blue flames. The only detail I feel might not have been necessary was the more shark-like mouth on the "chin" of the jaw-body; I feel like just the humanoid jaw alone would be a weirder, more memorable image, and the "monster" mouth might kind of draw too much attention from the more relatable human dentition. That's a minor nitpick though, and the mouth has a purpose anyway; the many "fear of" cards in Duskmourn all share an element of ghostly, human faces, and in this case, we can see that the vaporous cloud of heads are forming as the little sharky-mouth breathes in a thin stream of luminous vapor that seems to come from nowhere in particular. I don't actually know the lore explanation for this, but my immediate interpretation is that the monster draws energy from people who are, as we speak, experiencing terrible tooth-dreams on any other plane of reality, and we're seeing their horrified expressions within those dreams. Am I right? I'd check to see if it's been explained, but I'd rather leave my guess untainted.

I also love the flavor text that the closer you are to this creature, the more you'll feel your own teeth twitching and squirming, as if they want to "leap out and join the thing." Sick. I want to say you shouldn't worry, because this is a 1/1 creature - it does a single damage, and can only endure a single damage - which means the typical rat, insect or squirrel is an equal match for Fear of Lost Teeth. It does, however, automatically deal 1 extra damage to whatever you want if it happens to die, and the average normal human in this game is 2/2, so you yourself could somehow beat this thing to death with your bare hands, but then you just might suddenly drop dead with it for no reason you ever saw coming...or maybe not. Maybe your friend suddenly has a mysterious bite taken out of them. Or maybe it's someone you know who isn't even in the same room. Or, I guess, maybe there's a squirrel somewhere that abruptly keels over. Hopefully, not a squirrel you knew!

Fear of Lost Teeth is also a "nightmare" type creature card, which have existed for some time, but other "nightmares" in the game, in my honest opinion, never had all that strong of a thematic justification. We won't look at a whole lot of non-Duskmourn cards in these reviews, but I think we should look over a couple of more nightmares, real quick:

See? These are all undeniably awesome, and I know there's an internal logic as to why these creatures are categorized as "nightmares," since Magic's dev team cares a very great deal about consistent worldbuilding behind the scenes, but I personally wouldn't have noticed the difference if these were classified as demons, spirits or elementals. The best "nightmares," if you ask me, were previously those that corrupted normal living things, like Gloom Pangolin there. That I understand! The supernatural force of fear itself, perhaps, leaked into reality as a mutating force, or maybe someone out there was simply so terrified of pangolins that their mind birthed a pangolin of both terrifying proportion and unspeakable machinations. Still, these could just as easily be "horrors" again, and many "horror" cards have already also been scarier versions of animals!

I won't have room to review every single Duskmourn Nightmare, and you can see why I didn't feel I had room to cram them all on the same page together, either, but we will be looking at my favorites among them over the next few weeks, and we'll also see some creature types I can review all on one page together, so you're actually not even going to see just 31 weirdos by Halloween. It's going to be more like fifty or sixty, and luckily for me, they're not all going to take 1500 words to introduce and explain.

NAVIGATION: