The only 2 spiders without reach are Giant Trap Door Spider and Root Spider both of which live underground. I would be curious if they were making cards based on the name/art or if they were intentionally trying to make spiders without reach. Black and blue have never had a creature with reach unless you want to count things like Cairn Wanderer that can copy abilities. With reach moving into red we might see some more red spiders before mono-black ones. I would guess that blue is a color least likely to get reach but it would be cool to see a blue spider with defender.

Hi again! No promises, but I have made some progress on scripting my queries through the scryfall API, so maybe I'll get something interesting out of that soon.

For now, though, here's a quicky that I was looking up for my own entertainment: Manticores!

I've been enjoying Mount Velus Manticore's role in MH2 limited, particularly the way it ties several archetypes together. This particular manticore comes from Theros, and it got me wondering what planes have manticore on them. And here's what I found out!

Crimson Manticore introduced manticores to Magic, way back in Legends. It established them as red-aligned lion monsters with scorpion tails and bat wings. Every manticore printed since has been red, and for a while, they all could fly as well.

Sawback Manticore was our second and last Dominarian manticore. It's also the only red-green manticore, and one of two multicolored manticores. It doesn't technically have flying, but it can gain it, which is close enough.

Flailing Manticore shows that Mercadia has manticores I guess. Unfortunately, this one has the god-awful flailing mechanic.

Manticores took a break for 11 years before returning with Conquering Manticore, our first and only Zendikari manticore!

Chromanticore is memorable for a few things. It's the only 5-color manticore, it's our first enchantment manticore, and weirdly, it's also our last flying manticore!

Amonkhet was the first and only set to have two manticores in it, Manticore of the Gauntlet and Heart-Piercer Manticore. They both ditched the bat wings in favor of a tiger-scorpion hybrid appearance.

Manticore Eternal and Invading Manticore show us those same Amonkhet manticores eternalized. This gives Amonkhet the record for most manticore cards, at 4.

When we came back to Theros, we got another enchantment manticore with Dreamstalker Manticore! This one brought back the lion appearance, but kept the decision to remove the wings. My theory here is that someone on the creative team likes manticores, but doesn't want them competing with dragons so much.

And finally, we're back to Mount Velus Manticore, our third enchantment manticore. Did you know that all three manticores from Theros are enchantments? I wonder if Theros has any flesh-and-blood manticores, or if they only exist as Nyxborn.

And that's every manticore in Magic! This was more of a history lesson and less about statistics, but I think it's neat to walk through the evolution of a cool but infrequently-used creature type. Maybe next time I'll do manticores' robot cousins, masticores.

Unrelated to numbers, but is there a connection between Masticores and Manticores in lore?

There's not really any lore on masticores in general. This wiki links to some interesting articles that describe the differences between manticores and masticores, but they also acknowledge that masticores are "obviously derived from the fantasy Manticore creature". So you know what? Here's a brief history of masticores.

Masticore was printed in Urza's Destiny in 1999. As you can see in the art, it had the same lion's body and scorpion tail of a manticore, but was unique in that it was metallic, had no wings, and had several mouths. During this period of Magic, artifact creatures had no subtypes, so the masticore type wouldn't be introduced until later. Masticore was a very powerful card at the time it was printed, with the colorless combination of efficient stats, repeatable removal, and resilience managing to outweigh the steep cost of discarding a card every turn. This card was iconic enough to eventually inspire several future masticores, all of which followed a pretty strict template.

Razormane Masticore was our first follow-up, fitting right into an artifact block that did a lot of nods to iconic artifacts of the past. Here, the regeneration was replaced with first strike, which does help protect the creature in combat, but is ultimately less powerful. Razormane Masticore would later be reprinted in Tenth Edition, right after the Grand Creature Type Update! That's right! Masticores finally had a creature type, and it was... Masticore! It seems at the time, they decided the two masticores were sufficiently different from the three manticores, so they gave them separate types.

Molten-Tail Masticore carried on the tradition of artifact blocks printing masticores. This one follows the original Masticore more closely, but I remember it being a bit disappointing for a mythic.

Lesser Masticore toned everything down to print the cheapest masticore ever. You only had to discard one card, but the pinging was expensive, and the resilience was limited.

Sparkhunter Masticore is our latest addition. I like this one, because it clearly does what a masticore should do, but also has its own theme: planeswalker hate.

I didn't talk much about the art, but man do masticores have great art across the board. The more I think about it, though, the less convinced I am that these shouldn't just have the Manticore type. As much as I love tribes with strict mechanical definitions, masticores feel more like a specific subcategory of manticores than a tribe of their own, particularly now that many manticores don't even have wings. With both tribes having so few members, I think it'd be better if they just came together under one type. Is the demand for that change so small that it'll never happen? Probably, but I can dream.

Given the original art, the origin of the name would be pretty obvious, as it's more than likely a combination of manticore and masticate, as the original had three mouths well suited for such activity.

Since I wrote this post, we got our first monoblack spider! Say hi, everyone, to Drider. It even has reach and makes monoblack spider tokens!

Will we see more monoblack spiders in the future? I will admit that reach in monoblack feels weird, so this one seems more likely to be a one-time bend to fit the flavor of an iconic D&D monster.

I don't feel like spiders without reach is too much of a reach. Tons of real world spiders hunt without webs after all. More black spiders is practically a guarantee.
The bigger question is whether we'll see spiders in blue. Of all the "bug" critters spiders strike me as the most blue, being solitary, patient builder-types and all.

Spiders in NGA:
19
1
1
1

That's a pretty skewed distribution.

Black could be interesting there as well

I was randomly thinking about War of the Spark recently, and I realized that all the high rarity planeswalkers were characters who had been around for a long time, at least in terms of when they got their first planeswalker card. Every mythic was from the first few years of planeswalkers, and most of the newer planeswalkers got stuck with uncommons.

So anyway, I decided to graph it.



The graph isn't perfect. I was working in Google Sheets, which is... limited, so any overlapping dots (e.g. Chandra and Jace) will just look like one dot. But it's still kinda neat to see! That set really focused on the characters with long running backstories, which I suppose makes sense for the story climax that it was.

The biggest outlier is Vivien, who was introduced less than a year before War of the Spark, but still managed to get a rare. It feels like they really kinda shoehorned her in for some reason, especially given her minimal backstory, since her only previous printing was in a core set.

Everyone's favorite War of the Spark planeswalker, Teferi, would've been just to the left of Vivien if it weren't for his sneaky commander appearance back in 2014.

Here's the data if you want to explore it yourself. I might do another graph soon about how many planeswalkers are from each plane, and why do they keep killing the ones from Theros?

Huh, my first thought is that you'd expect the trend to go the other way- characters the audience has already seen before would get downgraded to common. I suppose WOTC figures the commons come across as the small fry.
WOTC really tried to push Vivien. Remember how she basically was the Ikoria trailer? I don't know how well it worked. Folks on the forums seemed unimpressed.

More planeswalker stats! This one is fun. First, the way I counted this was by counting every canon planeswalker who has gotten at least one planeswalker card. So Chandra gets counted once, Commodore Guff doesn't get counted because he has no planeswalker card, and Comet, Stellar Pup and Lolth, Spider Queen don't get counted because they're not canon to the main Magic multiverse.

So looking at the stats, we have a bunch of planeswalkers from unknown or unnamed planes. And because of the trend of giving old planeswalkers new cards, we have an amusing amount of dead Dominarian planeswalkers.

Theros has a fun history with planeswalkers. The first confirmed Theros-native planeswalker was Xenagos, who died in the same block he was introduced. Then later we find out that Gideon was from Theros. And then he dies. And only after that do the two living Theros-native planeswalkers get introduced, Callix and Niko. So we went from one Theros planeswalker to zero, back to one, back to zero, then up to one and then two.

Almost every plane we visit in a set gets an obligatory native planeswalker, but Strixhaven was the rare exception to this rule, so it gets no entry in this list.

I'm actually surprised how spread out the data is. Setting aside Dominaria, even the most popular planes don't have that many more planeswalkers than the newer planes.

Oh, and if you're wondering what "Plane of Mo..." is, I don't blame you, but it's the Plane of Mountains and Seas, which is officially where Yanggu and Yanling are from!

Here's a link to the data.

Well, barring any substantial changes to the paradigm, Skalla is probably going to be stuck with just the one for the foreseeable future.
I had the worst time trying to remember Basri being from Amonkhet. They really have done a surprisingly poor job of utilizing him.

Meanwhile, for the life of me, I cannot think of who the third Ravnican Walker is.

Well now I'm curious which one you were forgetting. The three Ravnican walkers are Ral, Vraska, and Domri (rip).

Funny enough, all were introduced in RTR block, and we haven't gotten any more since.


Yeah, it was super weird of them to introduce Basri in a core set and then ignore him for years. I can only assume that he's a plant for our next return to Amonkhet, in the same way that Kaya and the Kenriths were planted early for later stories.

It was Domri, specifically, that I had forgotten. Or more apropos to say, had scrubbed from my memory since I'd always strongly disliked him.
I would, however, argue that Ral was introduced in RTR block, since he and Kiora were early cameos from the Duels of the Planeswalker games.


I think what was so strongly strange about him is the lengths of fanfare that they went to introduce him. They made kind of a big deal about his debut.
And then... nothing.
I have to admit though, given the lengths of which we've seen our white walkers treated as of late, Gideon dead, Elspeth basically ruined with her NOT being dead, and Ajani compleated... we're going to be in a position to need a better white walker to fill those mono colored slots. They certainly aren't likely to tap Teyo to step up, and The Wanderer is... weird in more than a few ways.