ENTRY 12: BROODSPINNER

Instantly my favorite spider in the game, no contest! A multicolored black and green card, it's depicted as a spiny, fuzzy pink spider with three large human eyeballs sprouting out of it; one on the abdomen and two places asymmetrically on the head! it still has a cluster of its own aranean oculars, but I can't help seeing the two foremost human eyes as the "main" eyes of a totally zany toon-spider face. The spider's own eyes even register in my mind as a crazed smile full of little teeth! Whether or not that's intentional, I love it to death!

We also see some eyeball-bearing plant life in the background, and there are a number of little sacs in the spider's web, either filled with eggs or filled with prey.

Broodspinner has the same "reach" ability as all other spiders in the game, allowing it to block flying creatures, but with the awesome power of over two googly eyes, it also lets you look at two cards in your deck, then opt (haha "opt") to put them back or dump them in the graveyard. Then, if you pay six mana and sacrifice the broodspinner, you can generate a bunch of little flying insect tokens according to how many card types are in your graveyard overall! That's only "card types" as in Creature, Land, Enchantment and so on, not every possible creature type, so you won't be turning your spider into a whole big swarm, but it's still not a bad deal at all.

What are these insect tokens, though? While you can really use whatever you want to represent token spawns, and personally I prefer to use rubber bugs, but optional official tokens also get printed, and this is Duskmourn's flying black and green token insect, the same one produced by Broodspinner:

...An absolutely GNARLY nightmare manifestation of a hornet-like wasp, with a fang-filled demon mouth, a long flexible multi-segmented stinger, a weird thorny "tongue" that spews some sort of blackish mist, eyes formed of glistening fish-egg looking facets and an exoskeleton so fuzzy and scuzzy and grody it could have come from one of Warhammer's Nurgle illustrations. If that's not exactly the parasitoid that hatches out of a giant neon eyeball spider, I don't know what is. Incidentally, there is also a card in this game that makes spider tokens, and I think we'll be reviewing that later as part of another creature type, but the official printed token for those appears to be the same species as Broodspinner, too!



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