This is an initiative in collaboration with Wizards of the Coast.
One of the things that fascinates me most in the world of Magic: The Gathering It is the whole process behind the creation of each card. It is a subject that we have already dealt with on occasion in our Magic Chroniclesbut it still seems to me a titanic task.
Bringing out an expansion of cards is not only a Herculean task because of what it means when it comes to shaping each collection, its particularities, its artistic style, its playable style, that the lore old case with the new…
It is that it means making a thousand cards, that fit with what has been done in previous expansions, that are original, that are fun and that, on the rebound, everything runs smoothly. Normal that the latter does not always happen.
This is the story of one of those cases. One in which an artistic oversight ended up adding to the enormous list of Magic’s biggest mistakessigned by himself Mark Rosewaterand turning into one of those amusing anecdotes that someone like me can only surrender to with a “it could have happened to me“.
Dungeons and Dragons as a source of inspiration
We are in 1995 and Magic: The Gathering is still a bit in its infancy. It already sucks, and it has several expansions behind it, but it’s still far from the behemoth we know today and, as such, its processes aren’t as exquisite as the ones we could find in, what do I know, Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty, without going further.
Because of being beginners, they are a little bit of everything because they have already messed it up on some occasion, but they are about to live his most epic slip till the date. One that, in addition, will be closer to the inside joke than something that splashes the players.
The point is that they are working on Ice Age and they have an idea for a black creature that might be interesting. Costing five mana, the creature will be a 4/3 with a chance to gain flight and lose -1/-0 until end of turn.
A spirit or ghost would be the ideal candidate, so they start looking for what kind of creature they could sneak in to give the idea more packaging. With on other occasions, they decide to go to the book of monsters of Dungeons and Dragons and soon they find just what they were looking for.
The origin of the hyaloptera lemur
Out of all the monsters with cold resistance they run into the lemures, some spirits inherited from Roman mythology that look fantastic for that card. We are talking about the poorest and poorest type of demon that you can find, a mass of meat and bones made of those who lost their soul in hell.
If the demons had vassals, lemures they would be there to clean the latter’s shoes. Nasty, disgusting, but hell nonetheless, so a bug dangerous enough not to mess around when you come across it.
And what about flying? Well, here comes the somersault, because we would be talking about a lemur hyaloptero. And what the hell is hyaloptera? Well, an adjective that was used to name any insect that had transparent wings.
Imagine it, a viscous and misshapen mass of flesh and bones with transparent wings, as if it were the fairy of your worst nightmares. So, with that name, Hyalopterous Lemure in English, it was shared by the design team with those in charge of shaping the art and the phrases that adorn the cards.
The cutest demon
The flavor text instantly captured what the black creature was meant to impose. The lemures they could seem like bugs more likely to suffer in their terrible agony than to pose any danger, but in a matter of seconds the bug could take flight and leave you sold.
“The lemurs seemed harmless, until they descended under my troops. Within seconds, only bones remained.”
But for Richard Thomas, the artist who had to be in charge of putting a disgusting face on such bloody and unpleasant creatures, the name fell into his hands, awakening an idea completely different from the one pursued. What on paper represented a slimy demon, in his head automatically became the mammal of the island of Madagascar.
The result is the image you have below, a most cuddly creature from hell, with its transparent wings and endearing honey-colored eyes. Nothing to do with the purpose with which the letter had been created.
The relationship between the animal lemur and the lemur from Dungeons and Dragons
The most curious thing of all is that Thomas was not really far off the mark. The relationship between the animal lemur and the spirit lemur was not far-fetched and, in fact, the first owes its name to the second when the term was still used to refer to any specter that could assail you in the middle of the night.
Even before the human being identified the species and put a face on it, the large and bright eyes of the small primate, added to their nocturnal walks and the intimidating noises they made at night, invited the naturalists of the time to call them that way
And so the name stuck, and so they confused a Richard Thomas with just the right time to deliver an art that could not be corrected in time. The lemur was not the lemur they were looking for, but should be worth.
Years later, that mythical lemur ended up referenced in another letter as part of that inside joke, and in the text of the slimy lemursthis time looking like lemurs, the following was introduced:
“Lemures? Is that it? Finally something harmless…”
Imagen | Etsy
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