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Posted in News Posted on Monday, September 18th, 2017 by The Society To Preserve LobstermenMore articles by Andrew J. Nagy Posted in mtg

Homarids declared extinct in the wild, Camarid breeding program on last legs

“This is a disaster, an absolute disaster.”

I was sitting with Thoruzon One-Thumb, the archmage in charge of lobsterman studies at Tolaria West.

“What we have here is an indication that something is going wrong in the oceans. Dominaria’s native homarids are being pushed out of their ecological niche by other species that have been introduced by reckless planeswalkers.” One-Thumb was excited to talk to me, gesticulating wildly as he described the marine biology off the Otarian islands.

“The homarids only really thrived during the great ice age of course, but they managed to maintain a stable population afterwards for quite a long time.”

I asked him what had changed. “In a word? Slivers. When the Riptide Institute started breeding slivers, there wasn’t a lot of room left for noncompetitive creatures. Power levels had to rise, and while a rising tide may lift all boats, it often gives homarids -1/-1. And when these new slivers showed up, well, it took a while but now there just aren’t any homarids left.”

One-Thumb took me out to the spawning beds on his magical dinghy. “You can see here, this whole shallow area used to be covered in camarid eggs. But between the Slivers and the Phyrexian oil spill, there’s just nothing.” He lowered his staff into the ocean water and dredged up a few egg fragments instead of drawing a card. “This is it for the once proud homarid race, unless we can do something.”

This is where the Academy at Tolaria West comes into the picture. They’ve managed to open portals through time and snatch up unsuspecting homarids to breed in the present.

When I asked if they were worried they might cause a temporal paradox, that they might grab a homarid that was important to the timeline, the researchers just laughed. “There were no important homarids” explained Vizra Nine-Finger. “Outside of Time Spiral limited, none of them ever saw any real action, so we can grab whatever we want. And what we want is big strong breeding stock like this fellow — whoa, almost turned into Vizra Eight-Finger there!”

Later that evening in the Tolarian Tavern, I sat with the research crew. What made them choose homarids? “Well, the grant money is good,” Nine-Finger explained.

One-Thumb was quick to add, “and they’re just homarids. Nobody expects much from our research. But in a way, it’s also a labor of love. We all love Homarids. Especially with melted butter.”

The future looks bleak for these majestic lobster people of the Dominarian sea, with slivers still roaming the shores and a thriving market in their flesh. But with a return to Dominaria, perhaps new tribes of Sea Lobster men will come to the attention of players. And maybe, just maybe, some of them will be constructed playable.

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