Enchantment Creature - Nymph

As long as it's not your turn, spells you cast cost 1 less to cast.

"Wave-borne, he watches over secrets of the shore."
-Psemilla, Meletian poet

First male nymph?

Nah, Theros is based on Greek mythology and they didn’t have male nymphs. The male equivalent were satyrs. Greek culture isn’t WotC’s costume, and it would be misogynistic to allow males to colonize female space in Greek mythology. It’s clearly a female with small bust and a simple typo in the flavor text.

It actually does bother me pretty profoundly considering how slavish they are to the demon/angel junk

Yeah... seems like a mistaken knee-jerk reaction to imagined cries of 'fanservice'. It would be like making every siren creature and almost every siren in art male for an entire plane when they're theoretically a normal race based on an always-female mythical creature.

Well, considering how the biblical angels are traditionally seen as male-presenting (we are using their names as male names, for instance), switching the genders of nymphs and sirens is totally in line with how WotC have always operated.

Angels were Eldritch horrors made of flaming eyes and wings.
It's more that male names were derived from the Bible than the other way round.

Not really. Classical depictions depict them with humanoid forms and there were even ones that bred with humans (how the original Nephilim were born) which doesn’t necessitate looking fully human but since it was definitely with intercourse then they had to at least be humanoid and have real physical forms. The idea of angels just being unrelenting nightmare fuel seems like a misunderstanding of some higher forms having more inhuman forms.

And honestly yeah male nymphs bugs me as do female satyr. I guess they didn’t want to force a connection between the two because the general public wouldn’t get it but still.

Wtf is this thread

Yeah, there were several times where angels appeared in more humanoid forms, and were only recognized as angels once they performed miracles and then vanished. But then there are also the angels with four faces, only one of which is human. And the angels which are wheels within winged wheels, covered in eyes. It's a scale.

Ancient aliens. If you say it fast enough, it almost kinda sounds like angels

The female satyrs don't bug me quite as much because Satyrs in Theros (like Sirens in and after Theros) are depicted as a normal flesh-and-blood humanoid species. Which, while not utterly true to greek myth, is something that's happened in art and literature before, leading to the occassional goat leg girl. However, they kept their nymphs spirit entities that could plausibly be monogender without any handwaving since it's not something that matters to their coming into existence.

In other news, this seems like a decent common that will turn the eventual Cancel variant into Counterspell in limited. Doesn't seem to be quite good enough to make waves in constructed formats unless it ends up enabling something it is not supposed to.

Everworld leans into nymphs and satyrs being creations of the gods, so they have very limited personalities based on what traits were given to them and a satyr gets cut in half and he is literally hollow inside.

It is an extra piece of redundance for artifact storm decks in EDH. Not sure if the Elsha of the Infinite/Sensei's Divining Top combo needs more enablers, but that's what this is.

That's some sloppy creation on the part of the gods. Cool world building though. I want to see that sort of thing pop up in other media- mythical creatures being simplistic reality hacks more than complex lifeforms.


Are human-looking angels actually confirmed in the bible? I can only recall references to taking "the form of men" or somesuch.

The Bible doesn't give a lot of detail, but if you'll look at the book ofJudges, chapter 6, Gideon isn't sure if he's speaking to an angel or not, implying that it looked like a man. There are a few other examples of similar situations as well.

I didn't want to be the first person to complain when this card was spoiled originally, but I'm also firmly in the camp that dislikes the idea of male nymphs. Cases like this aren't just a question of mythological precedent, but also regarding the internal consistency of Magic's multiverse as a whole (which is the main reason their pretending all angels in Magic are female when that's clearly not true bugs the hell out of me). Other planes have nymphs too (mostly dryads but Dominaria canonically also has naiads for example), and we've never seen male ones on any of those, or in the original Theros block for that matter. I didn't like the male sirens on Ixalan either. I hope WotC will stop with that nonsense and not carry it over to planes I actually still care about.

Oh, and I really don't get why they're still clinging to that Dryad creature type when they could just use Nymph for everything, like they originally did with Shanodin Dryads...