ENTRY 10: INSECTS!

Our tenth review will be our first to look at an entire type, and we're looking at Duskmourn's new insect cards! The first is Spineseeker Centipede, because in Magic: The Gathering almost all arthropods are sorted into Insect, Spider or Crab, with I believe a couple of "scorpion" cards and even at least one "trilobite" or two. Spineseeker is an awesome design, too; its head is like a distorted human skull with an enlarged forehead, and the small eye sockets are where its antennae come out, which is something I've long done with some of my own arthropod creature designs! The body resembles a spinal cord and ribs, with rows of bony little finger-like legs, but then the tail tapers into a weird, fleshy hand, and the entire skeletal chilopod is rendered in a slimy, meaty texture of blue-grey and red-orange, like a sickly, rusted bronze sort of sheen. It's just gorgeously sinister!

How does spine-seeking allow you to access more mana, by retrieving a land? Heck if I know!

Flesh Burrow is another green centipede-like creature, but this one's armored blue body has irregular, dark cavities every few segments that are lined with little white teeth! The head is eyeless, with some short chelicerae-looking mouthparts and at least four antennae, two of which are thicker and end in a green luminescence. My guess is the head is equipped to burrow into flesh, but it's the malformed mouths down its back that feed on the surrounding tissue.

This is a creature with deathtouch, too, which means it kills any creature it damages regardless of that creature's relative toughness! And whenever it attacks, you can also give deathtouch to another of your own creatures for that turn, which is meant to imply a parasitic relationship. As the flavor text says, being bitten by a burrower will give you a craving for flesh, too! Also gangrene!

Wouldn't you know it, the third green insect card in Duskmourn is a pedey one too! Anthropede is the largest at 3/4, and it has "reach," meaning it can block flying creatures! The design looks mostly like a centipede with really ornate armor plating down its back, but its bizarre head consists of a ghoulish mutant bug-man sort of face fused between two catlike skulls, with six little round orange eyes arranged across the three. There's even an additional pair of large mandibles underneath, giving it possibly four mouths in total, and either small humanoid arms with claws fingers that also hang from under just the head segment. I'm not sure if enough of it looks humanlike for "Anthropede" to be the most suitable name, but it's very cool looking and original.

Our fourth insect is a combination black and blue card, the Skullsnap Nuisance! This flying creature has the wings and furry torso of a bat, but its head is a bare skull much too large for the body, specifically resembling a vampire bat's skull except for the single red eyeball in the center and the little nubby devil horns. Where the skull would normally have eyes, it instead has sockets that reveal underlying brain tissue, and finally, it has eight somewhat tarantula-like legs. It's a really fun, really cute little goof that would definitely feel at home in The Real Ghostbusters, and we do see it perching on an unsuspecting paranormal investigator. I'm not sure if it warranted an "insect skeleton" typing more than Spineseeker Centipede should have, however, and I might have just opted for Insect Bat, a typing Magic has already given to Stirges when it did a Dungeons and Dragons crossover.

Up next is the wacky Piranha Fly, the first-ever "Fish Insect" in the game! A simple, flying blue-mana creature, it's a vicious looking blue and orange fish with several little clawed hands, fins enlarged into functional wings and a pair of multifaceted eyes. There's not a whole lot of insect in it visually, but it's still a lot of fun!

Several creatures here were also all designed by John Tedrick, who also illustrated the leech and the skullcrab we reviewed earlier. There's a wonderful unused design here for a mosquito creature with a gruesome second face on the end of its elongated abdomen, and the ADORABLE "fetalfly," a pale fleshy fusion of vertebrate embryo and winged insect with a face like a blind baby bird. There's also an adorable "hand tick" that later became the Hand That Feeds! I think I still like this initial hand tick design, but a similar and very cool one also appears on the card "Monstrous Emergence:"

It's a shame this design doesn't get a distinct creature card, because it's definitely quite a bit different from the Mutant Hand; here, there are two humanoid hands sprouting from the end of the bloated ticklike body, and a cluster of humanlike tongues writhing from a gaping mouth.

Anyway, you can follow Tedrick's twitter here and his artstation account here!

Finally however we have a new legendary insect, Altanak the Thrice Called, specifically an "Insect Beast!" Altanak is 9/9 with Trample, meaning it runs right over smaller creatures and its damage "spills over" to the opponent. The design doesn't look like any one particular arthropod, but has a strange head almost shaped like an entire giant, eyeless mite with six short, hooked legs and two mandible-like fangs. This head is on a flexible grub-like torso with its own rows of little legs, and ends with, from what we can see, a body with huge legs ending in almost saurian talons. We can only see one pair of these clearly, but there's presumably more beyond the surrounding ruins. But who or what IS Altanak?!

Altanak costs seven mana to play, which is a lot, but another card in Duskmourn, Say Its Name, requires only two mana. When you play it, you can dump three cards from your deck into your graveyard and return any one of them to your hand, which is useful in itself, but if you end up with three instances of "say its name" in your graveyard, you can remove all three from the game to play Altanak for free!

The illustration depicts someone looking in a mirror, seeing three (of course!) strange insects crawling on him that I would presume are invisible outside the reflection. These cute little things show us what Altanak presumably really looks like, with upturned abdomens not unlike those of preying mantis nymphs, though they most of all look like they were inspired by Lobster Moth caterpillars (below). Each also has an extremely long, slimy green "tentacle" emerging from its body...or is that a parasitic worm?! I like the possibility that these actually are Altanak; that it can divide itself into three littler critters, perhaps.

A few have wondered if this is a reference to say Beetlejuice's name three times, though Altanak seems a little more serious and sinister than a guy who also willingly introduces himself as "BJ." I guess we don't really know that based on appearances alone, of course; it's entirely possible that Altanak is also a rambunctious prankster figure with a fondness for bad visual puns and sexual innuendos, who knows?!

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