When I bought my first Magic: The Gathering booster pack on the recommendation of a friend, I expected a fun card game. What I got was an open gateway to the most nightmarish imagery a 10 year-old could legally acquire. I was immediately hooked.
At the time of this writing, MTG artwork is at the cutest it has ever been. I’ve previously written about the most baffling artwork in the history of the game. Now, let’s go for a trip down memory lane to be reminded of the most disturbing stuff the popular card game series has ever brought upon us. Maybe this is how we get Wizards to come up with the most horrifying set next!
Living Wall
Living Wall’s artwork depicts human parts cobbled together in a wildly disharmonic and likely even highly dysfunctional way. Luckily, most of the Magic: The Gathering cards with the scariest artwork are based in fiction, or maybe in nightmares someone has had. The Living Wall might have a darker origin, however, as its artwork looks a lot like a very specific kind of tumor called “Teratoma”, which I honestly recommend you do not google.
Hey, do you know what’s also living and could make for a better wall than feeble human tissue? Trees. We have a lot of those in fiction, but someone at Wizards decided that they just wanted to go for the straight-up nastiest-looking wall imaginable.
Sensory Deprivation
If you’re into MTG, you likely expect the scariest things to come out of Blue cards to be counter spells. Not this time, as sensory deprivation features the very detailed depiction of a person with their eyes and mouth sewn shut. It’s not even a very good sewing job, as the eyes and mouth remain mostly open, meaning that the objective here was more about achieving the utmost cruelty, less about actually preventing the person to see or speak.
This is one of the few instances where the card’s ability does in no way match the absolute horror depicted in its artwork. Nice flavor text, though!
Claustrophobia
If you don’t suffer from claustrophobia, this one probably won’t do all that much for you – so long as you manage to never be buried alive and your final realization is that it is, indeed, a very bad thing. Despite featuring no actual gore, Claustrophobia, the card, manages to immediately convey the horrors of being trapped in a small space with no hope of release. The Blue color set is very good when it comes to surprising players with some really horrifying stuff.
Plagiarize
Plagiarism is the worst crime when it comes to writing, but it’s such a simple thing that it’s hard to convey how damaging it can be to one writer, to the writing community, and to art at large. I really can’t tell exactly how what’s going on in the picture translates to actual plagiarism, but I love how artist Jeremy Jarvis went out of his way to depict this crime as one of the most nightmarish things to ever come out of the Blue color set.
Ad Nauseam
Ad Nauseam features one of the most gruesome and panic-inducing artwork I’ve ever seen in an MTG card. It’s gory but bloodless, making all the pain that the creature shown above seem to have been very carefully engineered.
I believe Ad Nauseam works on its own, but please note how it’s drawn by Jeremy Jarvis, the same artist who did the art for the “Plagiarize” card shown above. I think Ad Nauseam goes from grotesquely amazing to extremely prescient when you visualize that poor creature as someone doomed to only read and copy plagiarized work until the end of time.
Mind Maggots, Brain Maggot
The first iteration of an MTG brain creepy crawly showed up on the Exodus set, and I’m willing to bet it was more than enough to fill everyone’s yearly recommended dosage of nightmares. Still, the people at Wizards are just way too generous and decided to keep at it with ever-more horrendous depictions of this terrifying being. The latest iteration of Brain Maggot is one of the scariest creatures in the history of the game both in terms of artwork and concept.
Great job! Please picture the writer of this piece as someone who definitely doesn’t have a few of these inside his brain!
Brood of Cockroaches
I believe we all agree that Cockroaches are just the worst creature IRL — yes, even worse than brain maggots. The only redeeming thing about Cockroaches is that they like humans about as much as humans like them, and try to avoid contact with humans as much as possible. The artwork of this card, however, shows us a much more grim reality, one where Cockroaches will actually crawl towards people while they are asleep – and where our cats will just not do anything about it. That’s two nightmares in one that result in a picture that requires no visceral imagery to get your human blood boiling.
Fleshformer
This is one of my favorites because it depicts gore in an almost beautifully abstract way. You know that something really really bad is taking place, but you can’t quite put your finger on what it is. That’s what makes the Fleshformer extremely scary, its ability to extract “mana” from people in a way so cruel that most others can’t even begin to comprehend it.
Lobotomy / Thought Scour (2012)/ Amnesia
I was torn between three cards depicting dubious and likely non-consensual brain-meddling, so I decided to just go with the three and make a nice before, during, and after scene. Lobotomy is the first of the bunch that I saw as a kid. It came out shortly after I’d started playing, and it immediately had an impact on me. We don’t see any gore, but the setup clearly leaves no room for the faintest glimmer of hope that things are about to turn out well for that person. Thought Scour is one of the goriest cards in the history of the game, so much so that the card’s latest versions feature a much more kid-friendly artwork. Lastly, there’s Amnesia, the closing act. It’s scary because of the gore, yes, but even more so because of that inexplicably alive person’s now completely empty gaze. All three cards are regarded by the community as some of the most disturbing in the history of the game, and I’m sure your brain will agree.
Pulling Teeth
Last but definitely not least, we have one of the simplest and yet most effectively cringe-inducing artworks in the history of the game. Even with access to today’s best methods, there’s a non negligible amount of the world’s population that just cannot stand the idea of going to the dentist without trembling a bit.
Pulling teeth, the card, excels because even though we think we’re looking at an image conceived just to make us feel sick, we may very well just be looking at a correct depiction of the point of view of a “dentist” from medieval times.
Feed the Serpent
The world of MTG is home to hordes of incredibly huge and vile monsters, but you never see one doing anything as scary as the serpent seen in “Feed The Serpent”, which is funny, because it’s just a normal instance of a giant snake snacking on a poor human. Though it features no gore and it’s not in first person view, you can very well experience all the dread that went through the poor guy’s mind — and even though he only felt it for an instant, you’ll have that image stuck in your mind forever.
Is there any more immediately terrifying card than Feed the Serpent? If so, I challenge you to show it in the comments.
