ENTRY 15: BEASTIES!

AWWWWWW!!! Look at it!! It's precious! "Bashful Beastie" looks like a big giant shaggy cross between a teddy bear and a shih tzu, with a cute little toothy bulldog underbite, hiding its only other facial features behind no less than four differen white masks in its fur, which is a very cool and slightly haunting visual, but doesn't detract from how lovable and sweet this big walking mop looks, even if it does have the "Manifest Dread" ability. Why's that? Why would a "bashful" beastie come with enough Dread to Manifest it? Well, it is a 5/4 creature, which is pretty threatening when players in the standard game only start with 20 life each, but being physically dangerous isn't all there is to Duskmourn's "Beasties."

Curator Beastie, which is 6/6 now, looks like a pinkish four-armed floppy-eared rabbit-dog thing, with a single eerie brass looking mask of a humanoid face with curled horns. It also has a belly pouch, and it seems to love collecting antiques, which would be why it automatically gives 2/2 to any colorless creature - usually "artifact creatures" - that enter play.

"Bedhead Beastie," a 5/6 with Menace, looks a lot more like Bashful Beastie, with the same underbite and long, dark shaggy fur, but it has elongated, lanky dog paw arms, and instead of the usual mask, it has an entire bed impaled on its horn, with the adorable flavor text "It had heard monsters were supposed to hide under beds, and it did its best." The perfect final touch is definitely the christmas lights tangled all over it, too.

Patchwork Beastie, my favorite of their designs, costs just a single green mana, but the card itself is considered a colorless Artifact Creature. Its entire hulking body appears to be made of tattered, ragged multicolored fabric, with a huge carved wood mask bearing a comical toothy smile and small, glowing orange eyes. This one has the "Delirium" effect, which is more of a drawback than an ability; it can only attack or block if your graveyard contains more than four card types. A 3/3 creature for just one mana would otherwise be way too cheap! Its flavor text is even cuter and sadder than Bedhead's. "It doesn't know it isn't real?" Oh no. Baby :(

Kona, Rescue Beastie is a legendary character, considered both a Beast and a "Survivor," a new type it also shares with the main protagonists of Duskmourn's storyline. She looks like a six legged, four armed, two tailed dogthingy with several cute masks clustered between her four ears. What we can see of her head shape and little needle-teeth gives me the impression of a bat's head, personally! But she's also carrying around a bunch of luminous containers and searching the woods with a flashlight. We're informed she has a "heart of gold," and that she goes around killing cellarspawn, which are actually Duskmourn's "horror" cards.

Finally there's Gribble, a beastie that exists only in the context of a human character, Toby! He's a little boy who's apparently really good at making friends with beasties and other monsters, and enters play generating Gribble, his best friend(?) of all, as a 4/4 beast token that can only attack or block if at least one other creature joins it. Gribble is a roundish, purple beastie with a huge crescent-shaped mouth and purple stripes, real "Cheshire Cat" vibes, as well six different masks covering his upper head and a simple, gold crown that immediately brings to mind Where the Wild Things Are. And if Toby also reads a little like a Pokemon trainer, that's probably also intentional, seeing as the same company is in charge of translating the Pokemon TCG, and there's also the card "Beastie Beatdown:"

It doesn't even have to be a beastie or any beast per se, but this card allows one of your creatures to directly "attack" an opponent's creature, rather than the opponent, which is a pretty rare effect in Magic! It can even give them a boost in the process, by applying the "delirium" effect to whichever creature you chose for said beatdown.

The aforementioned Maurice Sendak classic is an obvious inspiration for the Beasties, along with every other big, fuzzy scary-cute monster out there, or what I personally consider the best modern definition of "bugbear." Between at least Gribble and Kona, you get the impression that Beasties are "good guy" monsters of Duskmourn, and you're right, mostly, but that doesn't mean there's no horror behind their masks. I mean, literally whatever's behind their masks is apparently so disturbing and terrifying by human standards that they don't dare expose it, which is your first hint that they mean well.

An official short story, "Keep Them Alive," is a tell-all about Beasties, and you should probably read it first, but we're going to try and summarize it either way. Whatever the Beasties originally were, it's only known that it wasn't human, and that the house transformed them into their current state early in its existence. They didn't emerge with the same predatory intent or quite the same loyalty to the house as its usual creations, though, always wandering aimlessly in search of their "purpose," and even treated with hostility by the house's other monsters. It's not the only explanation, but maybe it considers them mistakes or failures?

The Beasties were originally led as a pack by a Beastie named Spindlewight, until he apparently took it upon himself to find a Purpose once and for all. Special note is made that he fought "horrors to the horrible;" or things "the other children of the house" fled from. It's not overtly stated, but I want to think this means that if he saw something picked on by something worse, he had a compulsion to come to its aid, if only because I like the hypothetical visual of him protecting something like an Appendage Amalgam from a Balustrade Wurm.

Spindlewight "found his purpose" when he heard the unfamiliar sound of crying, which he found unbearable but fascinating. On finding a wounded adult and two children, he was just intrigued enough (...and just wasn't hungry enough) not to eat them, especially when they "spoke in the language of the house." When a cellarspawn came for them, he fought it off, and the now dying adult, recognizing that the beastie was on their side, smiled at him. This apparently filled Spindlewight with a strange euphoria that sounds like a bit more than just a happy feeling, since he didn't even know the meaning of a smile. He just knew it felt good to make something smile, and immediately wanted more of that. The title of the story comes from the wounded human's final words, and that's how Spindlewight, and the rest of the Beasties, finally determined their purpose.

One of those two children unfortunately ran the moment they ever saw whatever it is under a Beastie's masks, but the other stayed with Spindlewight "through many adventures," long enough to reach adulthood, until Spindlewight was killed in some unspecified battle, and also disappeared into the depths of Duskmourn. By then, it sounds like they helped guide the Beasties in their purpose and the formation of their own culture, revolving completely around the protection of the "Keep-Alives." Children are obviously the easiest prey to the house, and to this day, Beasties follow the sound of crying to find them and bond with them, something that also seems to make Beasties stronger and braver to a supernatural degree. They even maintain a huge "playroom" somewhere in the house, where children add to an ever-growing mural of drawings that the Beasties practically worship.

It's all SO cute and bittersweet, you could easily revolve an entire fiction series about this concept alone. An infinite haunted house that eats kids, but a whole race of cuddly furry bogeymonsters exist just to fight back against that? It's a pretty awesome homage to every other "friendly monster from under the bed" story out there, while still having its own original identity and a cooler epic fantasy context.

The thing is...there's no confirmation that "Keep Alives" are ever "Kept Alive" long enough to escape the house. Presumably, almost nobody has ever escaped the house. The short story ends with basically the core mantra of Beastie civilization, such as it is: that their only purpose is to Keep Them Alive...but they will always, sooner or later, finally fail that purpose, and just have to keep trying and trying in the hopes that maybe, some day, they'll "really" succeed.

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