![]() This white-mana sliver grants the "first strike" ability to all slivers, meaning that they deal damage to an enemy creature first, and then only receive damage in turn if that creature survives. ![]() Is that a brain, or some other network of tissues and glands? I really like the look of that strange tissue in this sliver's massive, open skull sockets. Given that you normally get only one new card per turn, extra draws are a pretty hot commodity in this game. Mnemonic Sliver allows all slivers to sacrifice themselves, at a cost of two mana each, for you to draw an extra card. All slivers in play automatically share all of their abilities, always, and as you can imagine, this can start to get pretty bonkers.īlue mana is a color associated with water, air, and the mind, so it makes sense that one of the original two blue slivers would be a flyer, and the other a brainiac. This is the unique twist to this creature type. Its card reads "all slivers have flying." That means that when you put the winged sliver down on the table, every single other sliver you have out is now also able to fly, and any new sliver you play is also going to be able to fly, for as long as your winged sliver is alive and well. Here's the thing, though: the winged sliver doesn't just have flying. Give a sliver wings, and it kind of looks a little more mundane, doesn't it? Just a slightly odd pterosaur, really, though I honestly kinda like how they have more of a long, tubular body and shorter little tentacle-legs. "Flying" is pretty much the simplest and most iconic creature ability in the game, and simple means that the creature can only be blocked by other flying creatures. So let's take a look at all of the original Rath Cycle sliver cards, by color, and let's start with one of the most basic, the winged sliver. Which I did, but that doesn't mean they don't still have a special little place in my nostalgia, and we still haven't gotten into what really sets them apart as a concept. I practically wanted to BE a sliver back then, and I never thought it possible that I might even get tired of their aesthetic. I thought that this body plan was hands-down the single coolest possible creature I had ever, ever seen in the whole wide world. ![]() Needless to say, kid-me was head over heels for these things. Nothing either in nature nor in popular culture looks anything at all like a sliver, but something about this anatomical plan still feels extremely believable, like some phylum of our own animal kingdom that simply never was. It's a very simple set of features, but an unforgettably unique combination. The typical sliver has an eyeless, bony, swept-back head with a simple beak for a mouth, a single bony talon in the middle of its chest, and two prehensile "tails" it can slither around on. Though this particular specimen is an artificial imitation of a sliver, I think it's the best one to start out with, because it plainly illustrates the novel anatomy of these things. What really excited me back then, though, was a special set of cards belonging to a brand new creature type, exclusive to the plane of Rath and supposedly created by Volrath himself. I think this goofy two-faced snapper might be one of the reasons I put little weird hairs on my own monsters to this day. I wound up with one of these in my very first pack of cards from Tempest, the first of the Rath sets, and it was one of my top ten favorite all-time monster designs of that year. What's not dumb are those aforementioned bizarre, otherworldly abominations. The Krovikan Horror, the Urborg Mindsucker and various Thallids were almost all I had in my collection that really wowed me in terms of creature design, with the game still dominated largely by more conventional dragons, undead, giant animals and goblinoids.Īll that changed with what was known as The Rath Cycle, a set of cards promising an epic new storyline in which the crew of the Weatherlight - a magical, flying ship - face off against the spooky bad guy, Volrath, and the many bizarre, otherworldly abominations running around his artificially created plane, Rath, which I guess is like if I created a planet and called it Nathan. ![]() I hate time.ĭespite being wildly into the game, though, young teenage me had a hard time finding a lot of really interesting creature cards to call favorites. Now it's almost been that long since I started these reviews. A Magic: The Gathering Creature Review by Jonathan Wojcikīy October of 1997, I'd been a Magic: The Gathering fan for five years of my young life, which to a teenager feels like forever.
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