ENTRY 09: BALUSTRADE WURM!

So here's a concept that just positively kicks ass: a monstrous living mass of shattered floorboards with a giant staircase down its back, tunneling around in a haunted mansion foyer so impossible tremendous that it also houses a forest! Notice there's also a fancy little armchair on top of the Wurm's head, too! ADORABLE! A "balustrade," in case you also never heard it called that in your life, is specifically the type of railing we're seeing here, which I always thought was called a "banister," but that's apparently slightly different, and also apparently not even that obscure of a term, so really I'm just stupid. If you didn't know that until reading this, that still means I knew what a balustrade was longer than you did. Looks like I win.

I also LOVE Maxime Minard's composition of the image; the usual fallback for a long, giant wormy monster design is to put the head end front and center with the rest of the creature trailing off into the background, right? Or just filling as much space as possible with its coils if you really want to emphasize its size. But here, we have an arching loop of the wurm far off in the distance, its roaring head and maw are only a little closer, and another loop of it occupies part of the foreground, right up in our faces. This would be a cool perspective for any vermiform creature, but since this is the balustrade wurm, the part closest to the viewer just looks exactly like an ordinary staircase. Anyone skimming over the card too quickly could miss those same tell-tale ""balustrades"" adorning that raging beast in the distance, or just never really stop and think hard enough about it to connect the two...an obviously deadly mistake in-universe.

"WURMS" in Magic the Gathering are also something I could probably devote an entire article to reviewing; they're defined as huge, ancient, destructive and endlessly gluttonous serpentine behemoths most commonly (but not exclusively) associated with green mana, the magic of nature's strength and vitality. Aesthetically, they all fall somewhere on a spectrum between limbless snakelike dragon and an invertebrate, but BIG and HUNGRY are still the major constants.

A few wurms are already "artifact creatures," too, the classification normally given to non-biological creatures of every sort; clockwork knights, living scarecrows, cursed dolls, steampunk robots and biomechanical alien weapons are all things that would normally fall under "artifacts," and that even includes some supernaturally animate household items in Duskmourn itself, so it's just interesting that Balustrade Wurm isn't an artifact. It doesn't even have the "nightmare" status we've been seeing for the house's parareality manifestations, so by the laws of card typing alone, balustrade wurms are just...animals. They're alive. Is reality so screwed up in Duskmourn that a chunk of architecture can also be a species of animal, or is there a fully organic element to this wurm, just behind its hardwood flooring exoskeleton?

It's also one of various Duskmourn cards released with alternate artwork, reinventing the card frame itself as some sort of Ghostbusters-esque paranormal scanning gizmo, or something like that! That is SO fun! And I just want to say I adore that the game introduced a new tradition of alternate art that sometimes gets to be more stylized, whimsical or experimental, with a lot of cartoony and comic-booky offerings. They even have some done by Junji Ito I might find an excuse to review one of these days! Alexis Ziritt's Balustrade Wurm also offers a very different design take on the creature, which is exactly what I like to see in alternate art. This one is still mostly formed from wood shards, but the staircase coils around its body before spiraling inside itself to form the creature's mouth, the yellow planks of the stairs themselves evoking rings of "teeth" the deeper they twist into the thing's dimensionally impossible throat. DANG that's rad!! So rad, I don't even mind that technically speaking there aren't balustrades in this design. I mean, what even are those? Sounds like a made-up word for pretentious jerks if you ask me.

This alternate take doesn't shed any new light on the wurm's physiology, organic or otherwise, but in any case it's a monster design that takes full advantage of the setting's premise, making sense only in a haunted house of this outrageous scale. I mean, it's a whole entire predatory species disguised as stairs! Stairs like you go on all the time to either ascend or descend the levels of an artificial structure!! So like, you're just walking around minding your own business in an ordinary infinite giant demon house one day, and you see some pretty sick looking stairs to either ascend or descend, right, or maybe you wanna get a look at those beautifully carved balustrades because you're just suuuuuch a fan of balustrades you even knew that balustrades was a word already, but just when you're totally absorbed in the world of your precious beloved balustrades, no doubt suckling their little wooden spikes one by one like I bet is what big balustrade freaks like to do, you look over and finally notice there's this titanic killer worm snake over there and gee, it's funny how it has the same exact blue carpet and sexy gorgeous balustra......GULP!........UH-ohhhhh!...........

Now who's stupid!!!

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