ENTRY 18: OMNIVOROUS FLYTRAP

Today we look at the Omnivorous Flytrap! So that means it also eats plant life, I take it? Or just about anything at all I guess! This is one of a few cards we've seen that come from Duskmourn's "greenhouses," where all sorts of weird things develop, and a lot of things have eyeballs that aren't supposed to. You can even see a cute little eyeball plant growing here, in the lower right! The "flytrap" itself is a classic sort of design, a set of crocodilian jaws with a gnarly overgrown stem and a number of tentacles. It also has snazzy purple leaves growing down the back of its "head and neck," which bring to my mind a reptilian crest. Maybe you think this is otherwise a very typical plant monster design, and you're correct, since we've seen thousands of variations on this "Audrey II" template in all sorts of media, but it's not at all typical for this setting!

Omnivorous Flytrap is only the second Piranha Plant archetype printed in Magic the Gathering, the first being "Carnivorous Plant" released back in 1994...that's a gap of THIRTY YEARS! Magic has had various other plant monsters in the meantime, yes, but none of them have really been of the tried and true "giant chompy mouth on a single stalk" variety. Carnivorous Plant is such an old card in fact, it even pre-dates the introduction of the "plant" creature type, and was first printed as a "wall," a card type defined by its ability to block other creature, but not actively attack.

Omnivorous Flytrap also gets one of those rad TV scanner alternate cards, with a glitchy 3-d movie look! As for the card itself, you'll notice it is NOT a wall, and it also doesn't have the "defender" keyword that would also make it a defense-only creature, so presumably it's capable of walking or running around freely on its tendrils.

It also has a pretty wild "delirium" effect; every single time it attacks or enters play and you have at least four different card types in your graveyard, it can add two +1/+1 counters to any creatures you control, which would include itself if you just want a bigger and bigger flytrap. But if there's six different kinds of things in your big pile of dead things, it then doubles the total number of +1/+1 counters on anything it's boosted, which can escalate alarmingly fast in tandem with cards that bounce it in and out of play. I guess that's why it's "omnivorous," growing rapidly off your compost heap of everything from dead bodies to discarded weapons and the presumably nutritious residue of spent sorcery.

The fact that it can make other things grow is what makes it more interesting however, implying maybe it infests or assimilates other lifeforms, or perhaps shares its nutrients symbiotically. Or maybe it's just tasty? Maybe its weird diet of enchanted garbage and elemental corpses trickles down to whoever or whatever resorts to eating its foliage.

NAVIGATION: