ENTRY 05: SCREAMING NEMESIS!

Before you get bored of all the little crawling things I obsess over, let's jump to an extra scary, extra dramatic one, and another red card! This spooky spirit costs only three mana for a 3/3 creature, which is remarkable considering it has abilities on it?? Back in my day, most creatures in this game cost at least their power plus another mana for each cool thing they could do. Haste lets creatures attack as soon as they're played, when normally they have to wait for a turn, but the Nemesis also has her own more unique property that's downright spiteful: any time she's damaged, she can do equivalent damage to anything else she wants, and any player damaged by this ability "can't gain life for the rest of the game." Entire decks revolve around life gain, and this relatively inexpensive creature can just permanently shut it down, just like that?! "For the rest of the game" means there's no "cure" or any way to cancel this effect. MEAN!

She also has an awesome name, and a beautifully ominous design that might be difficult to read on a little magic card, but artist Liiga Smilshkalne has a higher-resolution upload on Arstation:

Screaming Nemesis is a luminous red and orange phantasm with what appears to be kind of a corpselike human body, quite small at the center of the overall mass. The skeletal face of the corpse is turned upwards and seems to have intense yellow light pouring from the eye sockets, nose hole and gaping mouth, then there's an emaciated little ribcage below it, and instead of a complete torso, the rest of that body seems to just be two long human legs, dangling directly from the shrunken upper chest. Before I saw it up close, I thought the glowing skull was a cluster of yellow eyes and the two legs were a long, stretched out lower face, the space between the feet kind of looking like its own gaping, toothless mouth-hole. Maybe that is in fact the impression we're meant to get, though, the entire corpse-body forming the creature's "head?"

A mass of ghoulish arms with long, spidery fingers erupt from behind the being, and the dark hair draped over the wailing skull expands outward into huge, thick, dark branches that fill up most of the scene, like giant black garlands. This hair is also matted into countless curving spines, so the illuminated space between the branches looks like a hellscape of fangs. Finally, there's kind of a "TV static" or "glitch" effect throughout, which is pretty novel for a Magic the Gathering being, and shows up more than once in Duskmourn!

The Nemesis even has alternate card art with a background of CTR televisions, though if you were hoping another illustration would shed any more light on the spirit's entire shape, this view is only more ambiguous. It's hard to see that there's a ghost girl dangling from it, and she seems distorted with multiple luminous openings that could be anything, really. There's definitely more mass behind her, though, and her various creepy hands are popping out of the TV screens! There's definitely a lot of story implied by this one.

NAVIGATION: