Pattern Recognition #344 - Magic and Horror

Features Opinion Pattern Recognition

berryjon

31 October 2024

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Hello Everyone! My name is berryjon, and I welcome you all to Pattern Recognition, TappedOut.Net's longest running article series. Also the only one. I am a well deserved Old Fogey having started the game back in 1996. My experience in both Magic and Gaming is quite extensive, and I use this series to try and bring some of that to you. I dabble in deck construction, mechanics design, Magic's story and characters, as well as more abstract concepts. Or whatever happens to catch my fancy that week. Please, feel free to talk about each week's subject in the comments section at the bottom of the page, from corrections to suggested improvements or your own anecdotes. I won't bite. :) Now, on with the show!

Magic has had a long and interesting pedigree when it comes to horror and the macabre. This is a game that started out with just the barest bones of flavor and style, and had to go from there, evolving in its own unique ways to incorporate this entire ... Well, Horror is not a feeling. Nor is it a Genre. It's something a bit more primal that can be used by itself, but is best combined with other aspects of story telling through the narrative or the environment to create a sense of unease or revulsion in the media consumer.

In the beginning, back in the old days of the 1990's, Horror as a concept was mostly in the realm of . This was the color that gave us Terror and Fear, and yet, it wasn't really what would be called Horror.

You see, in the early game, such feeling, such narrative, perspective or environment was best described as incidental. Horror and fear existed, but it was never the point. It happened and occurred as a byproduct of the setting and the way the game was set up. I mean, when you have an entire color dedicated to Swamps and has the symbol of a skull, you kinda set yourself up for a certain degree of expectations about what it was going to do. was the colour of the bad guys, and that made all the difference.

But Magic wasn't one to shy away from this sort of thing, and while I'm sure everyone reading can name plenty of cards that show something horrific - or just imply it - it never embraced it either.

Yet, this changed very early in Magic's lifetime. In the first few sets, they drew quite heavily form even more sources of mythology and literature that were free and easy pickings for inspiration. Rabidah was taken from 1001 Arabian Nights and its stories woven by Scheherazade. And this is the most famous example.

Homelands, the set, was inspired by Bram Stoker's Dracula. Baron Sengir was Dracula with a bit more differential applied to him, and the setting was the mystical Transylvania of pop culture. The horror in the set came about because of the setting and the actions of the people that were in it. We were - or should be, i have no idea how many people have read Dracula these days - familiar with the setting and we could read between the lines and see the underlying systems in place that would create such an environment.

But simply copying other sources wasn't good enough, and Magic expanded outward to create their own brand of Horror. They created, in the style of H. R. Giger himself, the Phyrexians.

ThePhyrexians embodied both moral and physical horrors. I've gushed over how awesome they were in pages past, but I do not have the time or space to talk about all that right now. Instead I will focus on those two data points I raised just now. First is that Phyrexia represented Moral horror.

Yes. Moral.

You see, unlike the modern interpretation of Phyrexia, which sees that culture as an infection that considers a participation award to be first place, the old Phyrexia gave a choice. It was openly honest about what it wanted and why, and was more than willing to negotiate to get it. It was corruptible in nature, seductive in its purpose and to the core. It offered power for a price. The Horror came from the characters in the stories and the players coming to see what happened to those that paid the price and accepted the power. The fall of Ertai is something that I do intend to cover at some point. He's an interesting character. Much better than any non-Pirate Jace.

The moral horror comes from a place of understanding. What the Phyrexia of old offered to people was a sense of acknowledgment that the lines of logic they laid out were not so illogical. That they didn't come from a place where Phyresis was the goal. It was a consequence. That the evil and bad things that happened to these people or because of these people was a result not of Phyrexia itself, but rather Phyrexia enabled the more human evils to be enlarged to the point of insanity. It was a means, not an end in of itself. That's what made it horrifying.

There was also the physical horrors created by Phyrexia for various purposes, but that's just visuals. They were monstrous in purpose so they were monstrous in design as well. This is where Geiger's inspiration comes into play. The Othering and the fusion of the mechanical and biological is supposed to make us feel uneasy and horrified in its implications. A lot has been written about that, and I don't feel like repeating well trod ground that's almost 30 years old at this point. Geiger mastered his craft, and has been emulated ever since for good reason. He was good at it, and you don't mess with perfection unless you want to fail.

Moving on, the next brush with Horror in Magic came in the Odyssey and Onslaught Blocks. Thanks to the effects of the Mirari and the Mirari's Wake, the continent of Otaria on Dominaria had to deal with an influx of Mutants and Nightmares. These creatures were mutated by power beyond their own, designed not by anything even remotely considered sane.

Hey there Braids, Cabal Minion! I wasn't talking about you directly, but it's nice to see you still getting the respect you deserve. You and Ixidor, Reality Sculptor.

The creatures represented Horror because at no point was any of these changes natural or even wanted. Some unknowable or inscrutable force would pass by one day, and that would be that! You were now something that horrified everything around you, leading to bad things happening to you and to them.

Several years later, Z the Zendikar Block gave us the Rise of the Eldrazi, a set that introduced the concept of Cosmic Horror into the franchise through what had initially been a very Dungeons-and-Dragons friendly setting. For those who aren't aware, Horror in the Cosmic sense is extraordinarily impersonal in nature. And what I mean by that is that the source of this sort of horror isn't something you can see or touch normally. They're not personal in the sense that you can interact with them. The effects are logic and reality defying because the horror is that you are utterly without context for what is going on, why it is happening, or even what you can do about it. You are an ant in the realm of giants.

You are Irrelevant. And that scared a lot of people, including the most famous codifier of the genre of horror - Howard Lovecraft.

We then ripped right back into Scars of Mirrordin Block, which had The Thing from the Who Goes There? dress up in the corpse of Phyrexia, turning the Deal With the Devil into a disease. Fuck that. That's not horror. That's disappointment.

And then right after that, players entered their third year in a row of horror themed sets with Innistrad. This was a return to the same Victorian-themes horror of Homelands, but with a far more mature development process and an understanding of the setting and the themes that go into it. It was a massive success! And fun! And horrifying to some people.

Battle for Zendikar through Eldritch Moon composed a combination of the two previous types of Horror, transitioning from one to the other with only a few hiccups along the way. And we got our first real Zombie Apocalypse, instead of an implied one, with Liliana, the Last Hope leading the charge, turning the horror of the Uncanny Valley into a weapon against the unknowable. It was awesome, and if I ever get that playmat of the Zombie hordes attacking the Eldrazi-infested people, I would love it forever.

After that, Wizards skipped out on anything deliberately 'Horror' themed for a while. Yes, it was always there, in the background, on the cards, and in the actions of the characters, but it was never a theme to the thing.

This changed with Duskmourn. This set was out and out a horror set, and it wears these trappings with pride. For better or for worse. However, unlike the previous outings, which had long and storied histories to take and develop from, this set focused on the far more recent(ish) Horror Movies of the 1970's through the 1990's, which is to say it was the 80's, but the specific subset began and ended earlier. It is horror that derived more from the shock value of the Big Screen than anything else. Where the spectacle of the events became the focus of the horror.

Sadly, this sort of thing doesn't translate well into card form, and Duskmourn loses a bit of metaphorical punch when we see the character archetypes that came from the heyday of Slasher Flicks. it was too busy trying to shoehorn everything in, with all the references it could that they didn't have time to realize that it was too much, and didn't let the set and the setting breathe on its own to come into its own horror.

Magic has always scared people. In universe and out. It's always had things designed to be grotesque and unsettling on the initial or followup views. From Macabre Waltz to Living Wall, the disgusting has always been a part of our color makeup and identity as long as you are . How you react to it is up to you, of course. People will react in different ways to different style of disquiet and unease. Some embrace it, others recoil from it.

Horror as a goal is something that can be respected as long as you understand what it is you are doing, and how you go about doing it. But you have to understand that the difference between good Horror and bad is in the consistency. A bad horror doesn't care for its own rules, doesn't respect the limits placed on the antagonists, and doesn't respect the audience. A good horror story can be quiet, it can be loud. But it respects its sources and it respects its intended audience.

Sadly, in my opinion, Wizards has missed more often than its hit. With Innistrad being the only real success here. Everything else is flawed in one form or another, and those flaws detract from their goals. We'll just have to wait to see what the next effort is like, but at this point, I don't have high hopes. We'll see.

Thank you all for reading! Please leave your comments below, and I look forward to talking with you about my subject matter. Join me next week when I talk about something! What? I don't know yet!

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