ENTRY 02: BALEMURK LEECH!
Oh, of course the made-for-me Halloween Horror House magic set introduces a new Leech card. DUH! There's actually been a steady uptick in the frequency of leech cards over the last few years, but they still remain one of the less populous creature types, with this being only the 19th printed in the game's entire history! Out of all of them, however, I guess Duskmourn decided I deserved a little birthday treat, or I guess artist John Tedrick did, because this is easily the best looking leech in Magic's multiverse.
Actual leeches have up to three tiny jaws at the dead center of the anterior disk, or a single thin proboscis lined with barbs, which you can read more about in my 2013 all-purpose introduction and overview of leeches! The four big, external "fangs" or "tusks" depicted in the Balemurk leech, however, feel like a refreshing change from the common lamprey-adjacent (or directly lamprey-lifted) suckers of other leeches just about everything in popular culture, including Magic, and I love the "horns" on its head that give it an adorable slug-like silhouette!
The cutie patootie is also shown tunneling up out of a grave, nearly as large as the headstone itself, so this is also a fully huggable-sized Hirudinean, and the reason it's hanging out in someone's grave, according to the flavor text, is that it "evolved to feed on dead flesh," though it's also "not averse to making its own." Now, I have to say this reads as if Wizards assumed blood was the natural diet of all leeches, when in fact, flesh is already their more common dietary preference! Most leech species are already meat eaters whether they scavenge, hunt, or both! There are also those "jawless" leeches that stretch open their toothless throats to slurp down snails, earthworms or other hapless quarry like slimy little boa constrictors.
SO, the wide open oral cavity of the Duskmournian leech, in my PROFESSIONAL opinion as unlicensed informally self-taught biology dropout, indicates a jawless leech, or even a formerly jawed leech that lost the need for its original teeth, which could admittedly also be what the flavor text is getting at. As it specialized more towards larger sources of meat, the tissues surrounding the mouth extended into four large, hardened papillae that provide a better grip on soil and carrion, which isn't any stranger than the five "tentacles" of those awesome cave leeches you also just learned all about in that article I linked up there, or maybe already learned about from "academic sources," because you're a real fancy-pants, huh?!
Duskmourn's demonic forces, as we'll come to see, would have justified any absurd anatomy you could imagine; this could have just as easily been a leech covered in screaming dog skulls or a leech made out of skinless baby hands, and I would have loved it anyway, but instead we've got one of only maybe two leeches in the history of Magic that's biologically feasible. Biologically feasible and huggable-sized. It's a double birthday present!
