ENTRY 30: OVERLORD OF THE BALEMURK

I know I said the Hauntwoods was my type of place, but maybe the Balemurk is where I'd wanna live in the house? Black mana is tied to swamps, so the Balemurk is another nice and wet realm, but this one has more of a basement and crawlspace motif, marked by extreme darkness and rooms sinking into soil. It's another part of the house with lots and lots of buggies and worms. It's where the local leeches are from, after all! I also love this basic swamp illustration, with a set of giant prickly arthropod legs curling out of a doorway that also kind of looks like a mouth, flanked by two lights to give the impression of eyes. You can also see how at least two of those insect limbs continue further into what you might mistake for sewer pipes! Cool!

The Balemurk's Overlord - let's say, I dunno, Murlene? - Murlene, is hands-down the most unsettling. This humanoid figure has multiple pale fleshy arms and legs that end in twiggy, hooked claws, and little tombstones sprouting up here and there from the flesh. There are cobwebs stretched between their joints, and their whole torso is a completely stripped bare ribcage. Around their neck is a sort of collar that resembles both another ribcage and a crown, while their head consists of two rotten horse skulls with a big, staring human eye in between them. SICK. Really looks like some kind of classical Ars Goetia demon.

Murlene's special ability, activated the same as all the other Overlords, causes you to mill four cards - dumping four cards from your library to your graveyard - then if any of them are creature cards other than an avatar (like the Overlords) or a planeswalker, you can put it in your hand. Black's major strategies include sacrificing your own stuff and speeding up your strategy, so this is a pretty solid expression of that. Burning through four cards at a time just for one of them might sound bad, but whatever gets your creatures out faster! Not to mention, if you're playing black, you should be able to play stuff out of the graveyard anyway.

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