Well, it turns out ties are like buses, because we’ve waited ages only to now get two together. Anodet Lurker and Aerathi Berserker have tied. I’ll be following the same process that I explained last time.

Anodet Lurker

Design

A simple enough common - an overcosted creature with a minor death trigger. Fifth Dawn was all about combos, and this card isn’t playing into that at all, but it is a filler Limited card. The power level is on the low side however and the card isn’t an exciting prospect even in its home Limited format.

Flavour

Apparently these things are delicious, and according to the flavour text try hard to look scary to deter predators. That’s a real evolutionary strategy, although being machines apparently Anodet Lurkers do this themselves. It’s not clear to me to what extent the Constructs of Mirrodin are built by others versus naturally occuring, which is a little odd. Not much else to say here.

Art

Jeff Easley’s piece here is reasonably scary-looking, as the flavour text calls for; built out of cables and mysterious blobs. Not so sure about delicious, but this is a reasonable piece to illustrate this concept.

Place in Magic history

There’s a nice piece of Magic history here: early Magic was very keen on anagrams. Onulet from Antiquities was supposed to be an anagram of Soul Net, but the ‘s’ had to get dropped because the art has only one creature in it. But “Anodet Lurker” - a card which is similar to Onulet functionally - was made to be an anagram of “Darker Onulet”.

Aerathi Berserker

Design

Well, not much to say here. Rampage was an early mechanic that pumped the creature (in this case by +3/+3) for each blocker beyond the first, loudly discouraging multiple blocking. But while the ability is interesting and useful on smashy creatures like Craw Giant, here we have a five-mana 2/4, with triple coloured mana symbols. The issue is simple: Because of Rampage 3, a creature needs to have at least 4 power to be worth adding to a gang block on Aerathi Berserker. But if you have a 4 power creature, why not just single-block the Berserker with it? Outside of fun Lure scenarios, this isn’t going anywhere.

Flavour

Now here is some great world-building flavour text. You immediately get a sense of the Aerathi as warriors with little room for weakness or compassion. That their society treats their “promising” children this way is pretty mad and pretty cool. On the flip side, the card design doesn’t do a lot to show the strength of someone that has survived that ordeal and become a berserker.

Art

Melissa Benson’s done some great work here to show a classic Conan-esque barbarian, with a massive bloodstained axe and WWE musculature. It’s not massively original, and the execution is typical for 1994 in being a bit hit-and-miss, but it definitely sells “scary berserker” to me.

Place in Magic history

This card’s name has been on quite a journey. As you will see in Gatherer, the printed version’s name shows “rathi Berserker”, as the ‘ash’ ligature ᴭ was missed out. This is especially clear as the ligature appears correctly in the flavour text. The official version was always called ᴭrathi Berserker, right up until the Oracle changes for Kaladesh which removed the ligature from Oracle and left us with Aerathi Berserker.

Final reckoning:

DESIGN: Anodet Lurker

FLAVOUR: Aerathi Berserker

ART: Aerathi Berserker

PLACE IN MAGIC HISTORY: Aerathi Berserker



WINNER: Aerathi Berserker