ENTRY 21: EYES!!

I LOVE eyeball monsters of course, the more "eyeball" to them the better, but "eye" is a remarkably rare creature type in Magic, with only a handful of cards to its name! Creeping Peeper is an especially adorable one though; it has the body of a hairy black spider, but the front of its swells into one huge, shiny ochre-colored ocular sphere with a little beady pupil, scurrying down a suspended bookshelf. It's a simple 2/1 that can also generate blue mana, but only for use in enchantment cards, room cards, or to turn cards face up (such as in the Manifest Dread effect). Since it doesn't have a "spider" typing, we can also assume its physiology is purely superficial.

Even with only a couple of other "eyes" in the whole game though, Duskmourn decided it wasn't content with just the lovably named Peeper, and that it needed at least one more, even eyelier eye:

ABHORRENT OCULUS is a flying 5/5 monstrosity for only three mana that also automatically manifests dread every enemy turn, though you have to remove six cards in your graveyard completely from the game to play it. Its illustration by Bryan Sola is also just gorgeous, and everything us Eyeball Monster purists look for: just a raw, naked realistic human eyeball with no unnecessary flesh, in this case just possessing six long, whiplike trailing tendrils of gory red tissue, and the simple yet genius addition of over a dozen clawed fingers completely encircling the cornea. Why didn't I ever think of that?! We can see how they can even perfectly fold up neatly into said cornea, and maybe it even uses the pupil as a "mouth," pulling things inside with the little claws? Whatever its biological processes, that's an absolutely AWESOME design twist I have truly never seen before in a disembodied eye. Bryan positively knocked this out of the park!

That's not to say Igor Krstic's alternate illustration isn't really cool too, though; here we see it stalking up behind some poor fool in his reflection, seemingly not present on his side of the glass, and while this one lacks the redder tentacles or the fingers, it has its own cool aesthetic with branching tentacles of various widths and lengths, as well as a relatively huge cornea with a more ragged-looking pupil opening, a less human and more animal-like eye that, together with its overall rusty brown-tinged color scheme, also comes across as a little damaged or decayed. Maybe even like an old pickled laboratory specimen!

NAVIGATION: