ENTRY 25: TOYS!
Artifact Creatures have been a part of Magic since almost the beginning, and a lot of them would thematically qualify as animate "toys" over the years. But surprisingly, "toy" has only been introduced as a brand new creature typing as of Duskmourn, with exactly a dozen of them dropped all at once. Their backstory is exactly what you might expect; toys brought to life by the house with a lust for violence, and a special hatred for former owners who abandoned them.
Splitskin Doll is one of the simplest, a 2/1 creature that lets you draw an extra card when it enters play, though it also forces you to discard one unless you control another creature with 2 or less power. I guess it needs a little friend to hang out with? I really love its design; a a crude cloth doll body, a frill collar, and a round porcelain looking head with huge, glazed over slimy eyeballs that drip dark blood. It also has a lot of little chitinous looking spines bursting out of its cracks and seams, like there's something new and disturbingly biological growing beneath its surface, which is precisely the case for many Duskmourn toys! The flavor text says people go missing after "mocking its ragged surface and seeping eyes," but who in the world ever would?? Who would look at this poor little thing and make mean jokes?! They absolutely got what was coming to them. It's okay little friend. You were 100% justified.
Ragged Playmate is another simple one, a 2/2 that can be tapped to prevent another creature with up to 2 power from being able to block for the rest of the turn, as if it helps hold something down while its friends wreak more havoc. It's another of my top designs for this creature type, too, because it looks like just your typical spooky ragdoll at first, with button eyes and crudely painted features, but the hair is a mess of visceral looking red tendrils on closer inspection, and it has two shiny orange Digimon-like eyeballs on its little body, as if the ragdoll head is kind of a decoy face. Like a Mimikyu!
Friendly Teddy is a fully colorless one, which I may have mentioned was once the entire gimmick of Artifact cards, so I appreciate when they get back to basics like this. Friendly Teddy is a 2/2 that simply allows each player to draw an extra card when it dies, which is pretty friendly I guess! The art depicts a traditional looking teddy bear, a little dirty and grimy, but with multiple black eyes, like a spider, and some tiny white teeth lining the seam down its stomach! Cute flavor text, too, about it "sharing secrets" like "where the matches are," the time honored trope of the spooky toy that whispers terrible ideas to, in most cases, an equally spooky child.
Piggy Pank is considered both a toy and a "boar," which is funny. And when it dies, you get a treasure token! This is another addition to the game added in the years I wasn't actively playing, and it went over well with players; a token artifact that you can expend for one mana of any color you want! I love how cartoonish and wacky this illustration is, too, a completely dorky looking buck-toothed piggy bank with a little blue hat. Of course it also has multiple shiny green eyes, including along its tail, and a big fracture in its stomach ringed with multiple layers of jagged fangs.
Clockwork Percussionist is a smaller 1/1 guy, a wind-up monkey that plays a drum, but the drumsticks are bones, and the drum itself is torn open into a giant, drooling monster mouth, D&D Mimic style. I really like the recurring theme that the toys don't necessarily use the "right" part as their mouth or head! Why should they?!
Attack in the Box! Oh, this one is SO silly! A completely vicious evil looking clown whose "jester hat" tassels are actually eyestalks from the look of it, ending in almost Cephalopod-like eyeballs, which still gives the impression of jingly bells. It also has such ghastly little spindly white arms and hands! One of the earliest nightmares I ever had as a kid was about a Jack in the Box, which I still remember fondly.
I like the ability here, too, where you can choose to give it an extra 4 attack - which is quite a bit! - but it'll die at the end of the turn. I like any ability that's really clearly based on how the creature physically operates.
Patched Plaything is another teddy bear example, but with a lot more going on visually! It shares the "spider eyes" of Friendly Teddy, but a seam full of bloody fangs extends from its side all the way to its face, where it expands wider into a bigger and nastier maw. Then of course there's a doll baby face sewn onto its stomach.
Living Phone! One of those plastic baby phones with wheels might not have been an obvious choice of haunted toy before Skinamarink, though instead of a clown-like face, this adorable fiend has a round, green light within its rotary dial that displays a spooky digital looking smiley face. When this one dies, you can look at five cards in your deck and keep any creature card with 2 power or less, like it rang up and called something else over. It can be anything at all of course, but if your deck is themed around toys, it's calling one of its pals!
Giggling Skitterspike is the weirdest and most monstrous of the whole type, an eerily staring baby doll head suspended in a bird cage with multiple jagged, bloody, bladed metal legs. Duskmourn is intentionally loaded with movie shout-outs, so I feel like this probably had the metal spider doll from Toy Story in mind. Either way, I'm still a sucker for this sort of 90's Goth Comic Book kind of monster design, like the enemies from American Mcgee's Alice and whatnot.
Skitterspike is only 1/1, but it has the awesome indestructible ability, exactly what it sounds like, and any time it attacks, blocks, or becomes targeted by a spell, it automatically deals a damage to every player anyway. If it attacks and isn't blocked, that means it deals 2 to the target, and in a game with multiple opponents, the rest get a little bonus stabbing. It also has Monstrosity 5, an ability that lets you pay any five mana to put 5 +1/+1 counters on it so long as you haven't already done so, pumping this immortal murderbaby up to 6/6.
We then have the first of two legendary toys! Arabella, the Abandoned Doll, is obviously a shout out to the real world Anabelle, and she's the same sort of spooky porcelain little girl doll in a fancy dress. She's also surrounded by a bunch of other toys with assorted monstrous mouths and eyes, and her official backstory holds that she organizes toys into pack hunters! This is reflected by her ability, where anytime she attacks, the opponent loses life equal to the number of creatures you control with 2 power or less. Then you also gain the same amount of life, because Arabella, canonically, actually wants to be loved and seeks the approval of an owner, even while clinging to a murderous rage towards the child that threw her out the moment she started moving.
The next legendary example is Marvin, Murderous Mimic! He's an absolutely WRETCHED looking Ventriloquist dummy whose cracked wooden face has scattered, whispy hairs, obviously organic eyes and fractured looking little teeth. He has all the activated abilities of all other creatures you're controlling, at all times! He's apparently also a marionette, though his flavor text claims he doesn't have strings anymore, and we can clearly see strings hooked to his baggy cloth-covered body.
Marvin also has alternate artwork by Sam Wolfe Connelly that I really love, the horrible puppet illuminated blue in a pitch black void, overlaid with a ghostly blood red skeletal hand in the foreground. It's just a rad looking card.
Finally, we have the Twitching Doll, a green mana Spider Toy, because it's completely and totally stuffed with arachnids! It can tap to produce mana of any color you like, then you can put a nest counter on it. Later, you can then sacrifice the doll to generate a 2/2 spider token for every counter that was on it! Hooray!! The illustration by Warren Mahy shows that it was once a baby doll, but the old porcelain head has been discarded, and its new head is a mass of spiders in the shape of a kitten's head.
Good old John Tedrick, who designed the look and feel of many of the toys, illustrates an alternate Twitching Doll just made entirely of entangled little spiders in a fancy frilly dress, still with an adorable catlike head. The green eyes seem to be the abdomens of two exceptionally large arachnids, while the abdomen, fangs and legs of a single big, pale spider inventively form the cat's nose, upper teeth and whiskers!
I also absolutely love the design on the front of the dress: a little cartoony image of a plucked goose, ready for roasting, with the goose's severed head wearing a little blue bonnet. Like Mother Goose?? It's just so silly! Everything about this is so lovably silly! Why are spiders forming a fancy little kitty cat doll ready for a tea party?!