{"id":923689,"date":"2026-07-09T18:05:46","date_gmt":"2026-07-09T18:05:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/923689\/"},"modified":"2026-07-09T18:05:46","modified_gmt":"2026-07-09T18:05:46","slug":"endangered-species-on-renegade-creature-types","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/923689\/","title":{"rendered":"Endangered Species: On Renegade Creature Types"},"content":{"rendered":"

Did you know that Living Wall<\/a> counts as a wall? Did you know that Lead-Belly Chimera<\/a> counts as a chimera? Did you know, scandalously enough, that Teeka\u2019s Dragon<\/a> counts as a dragon?\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Teeka's<\/p>\n

One of many treats that comes from trawling through Scryfall instead of working is that you get to find these strange and seemingly redundant relics, remnants of an older kind of Magic. I remember coming across Living Wall<\/a> early in my life as a Magic player\u2014building, as is rite of passage for any would-be and will-be lover of odd EDH decks, an Arcades, the Strategist<\/a> deck\u2014reading the rules text, and thinking: Well, duh. Why wouldn\u2019t it count as a wall?<\/p>\n

In one way, there\u2019s a pretty simple answer. Before Magic standardized type lines on cards, Artifact Creatures like Living Wall and Teeka\u2019s Dragon and company didn\u2019t list any subtype; now that creature types have been retroactively standardized, they read \u201cArtifact Creature \u2013 Wall,\u201d \u201cArtifact Creature \u2013 Dragon,\u201d and so on.<\/p>\n

\"Scryfall<\/p>\n

In another way, the answer is endlessly complicated. The fact that the type line could be the site of such strange muddied confusion is telling, in itself, of the uneven processes by which the game\u2019s flavor has crystallized over the past three decades.<\/p>\n

Whispered in the gaps between the words Counts as a Wall, there\u2019s a world, a history, and a menagerie, all at once. Inside that little phrase we can detect strained efforts at standardization, and also standardization\u2019s very failures\u2014the strange and the forgotten, the homogenized and the hangers-on, those that are defined by and those that defy Magic\u2019s creature typing system. These are Magic\u2019s forgotten creature types.<\/p>\n

Type Before Time<\/p>\n

I referred a moment ago to the way that creature types were retroactively standardized. Let me explain a bit more, because it\u2019ll be important: this event, the so-called Grand Creature Type Update, is the Chicxulub Meteorite<\/a> that reshaped the face of Magic.<\/p>\n

Around the time of Lorwyn\u2019s 2007 release, designer and rules manager Mark Gottlieb posted an article to the Magic mothership<\/a> announcing that Wizards of the Coast would be undertaking a massive errata update on all creatures printed since the game\u2019s origin.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Up to that point, Magic\u2019s creature typing system had been highly uneven, developing in juddery spurts. The first developments groaned along from Magic\u2019s debut to 1998, when creature spells were called \u201cSummon\u201d spells\u2013they were spells that summoned creatures, after all.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Two<\/p>\n

In lieu of descriptive creature types, the type lines on Summons read like a kind of instruction: where the\u00a0 Llanowar Elves<\/a> of Foundations reads \u201cCreature \u2013 Elf Druid,\u201d the Llanowar Elves of Alpha reads \u201cSummon Elves.\u201d I command you, player, to summon some elves!<\/p>\n

As Alpha Llanowar Elves bears out, the early type line often drew its \u201ctype\u201d from part or all of a creature\u2019s name. Benalish Hero<\/a> and Bird Maiden<\/a> was \u201cSummon Bird Maiden,\u201dand Bog Wraigh<\/a> was \u201cSummon Wraith.\u201d Others got absurdly specific, like Arabian Nights\u2019 Ali from Cairo<\/a>, whose creature type was, in fact, \u201cSummon Ali from Cairo.\u201d In fairness, there\u2019s probably more than one guy named Ali in Rabbiah\u2019s version of Cairo.<\/p>\n

Things became complicated almost immediately, however, by the existence of cards that cared about specific creature types. While \u201ccreature type matters\u201d wouldn\u2019t be a large-scale theme until 1997\u2019s Tempest, plenty of cards in Alpha were designed around enhancing creatures of a certain type\u2013like Lord of Atlantis<\/a>, a Merfolk beefcake whose name originated the slang term for creatures that buff creatures of the same type<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Three<\/p>\n

Yet given the loosey-goosey vibe of creature typing, there was inescapable ambiguity: does Goblin King<\/a> count as a Goblin, even though his type is \u201cGoblin King?\u201d (No). Kobold Drill Sergeant<\/a> and Kobold Overlord<\/a> are respectively typed \u201cDrill Sergeant\u201d and \u201cLord,\u201d but are they Kobolds? (Also no). Here, there\u2019s essentially a gap between art and mechanics that player intuition needs to fill or otherwise bow to: it doesn\u2019t say Kobold Drill Sergeant is a Kobold, but it\u2019s clearly a Kobold.<\/p>\n

A few years into Magic\u2019s life, Wizards of the Coast would formally iron out these wrinkles. The first glimpse of the change came in 1998\u2019s start set Portal: Second Age, which broke from convention and labelled creature types in the way we\u2019d recognize today: Vampiric Spirit<\/a> was typed as \u201cCreature \u2013 Spirit\u201d (though not, amusingly enough, vampire). The next year, Sixth Edition\u2019s massive rules change would universalize this format for creature typing, and 2003\u2019s Mirrodin block went further, introducing the now-standard Dungeons & Dragons-inspired \u201cSpecies-Class\u201d template for creature types. Llanowar Elves became a Cleric as well as an Elf.<\/p>\n

\"Three<\/p>\n

Along the way, creature types were sporadically folded together, errata\u2019d out of existence: Sengir Autocrat<\/a> changed from \u201cAutocrat\u201d to \u201cMinion\u201d (and was eventually changed again to \u201cHuman\u201d), Sabretooth Tiger<\/a> changed from \u201cTiger\u201d to \u201cCat,\u201d and one of my favorite stupid cards of all time, Evil Eye of Orms-by-Gore<\/a>, changed from \u201cEvil Eye\u201d to \u201cHorror\u201d (it would be changed again to \u201cEye\u201d in Time Spiral. In 2007, the Grand Creature Type update made a huge consolidated set of changes, changing nearly 1200 cards and obsoleting nearly 150 creature types.<\/p>\n

Many were lost in this huge, arguably regrettable<\/a>, probably necessary change. Abomination<\/a> and Lord<\/a>, Hipparion<\/a> and Maiden<\/a>. By God, they even got Ali from Cairo.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

But there were survivors, strange renegade creatures that probably should\u2019ve been obliterated but weren\u2019t. And they tell a story that\u2019s even more interesting.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Errata Escapees<\/p>\n

In the post announcing the Grand Creature Type update, Gottlieb listed a few rationales for creature changes. The most telling had to do with \u201cobsolescence\u201d:<\/p>\n

\u201cObsolete creature types were eliminated. A number of completely bizarre creature types were still on the books. Being? Entity? Gaea\u2019s-Avenger? Gone, and their former owners now have more sensible types. In addition, there were a number of creature types that were too specific, and these have been folded into more standard types. For example, Erne and Vulture are now Bird, and Dragonfly and Ant are now Insect.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Two<\/p>\n

This update makes sense, I think: it helps ensure that the mechanical flavor intuitively matches mechanics. Shouldn\u2019t Osai Vultures<\/a>, originally printed as a Vulture, be buffed by Kangee, Aerie Keeper<\/a>, which enhances all birds? (On the other hand, of course, there are some blips: would Soraya the Falconer<\/a>, who originally buffed Falcons specifically, know how to handle any bird?)<\/p>\n

Even despite the demolition of \u201cBeing\u201d and \u201cEntity\u201d and the rest, there are more than a few marginal creature types that escaped the desert winds of obsolescence\u2014and they\u2019re often quite revealing of Magic\u2019s history.\u00a0<\/p>\n

One of these types, one which I\u2019m absolutely obsessed with, is Nightstalker<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Shimian<\/p>\n

The first was Legends Shimian Night Stalker<\/a>, a 3BB creature with a neat damage redirection ability and a neater Jesper Myrfors illustration (I\u2019d kill for those legs). Given the aforementioned pre-Sixth Edition type line format, it wasn\u2019t clear whether \u201cNight Stalker\u201d (with a space between the two words, keep in mind) was a species or a way of describing this leggy marvel.<\/p>\n

Two years later, Mirage answered the question, kind of, by debuting three new Night Stalker\u2014none of which looked like Shimian Night Stalker, none of which looked exactly like each other, and none of which had \u201cNight Stalker\u201d in their name.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Three<\/p>\n

Each one is illustrated by Cliff Nielsen, but they\u2019re visually disparate (one an assassin made of shadow, one an infernal panther, one a wispy trail of mist), and their background is unclear. The flavor text on Breathstealer<\/a> and Feral Shadow<\/a> implies that Night Stalkers are bad-dream demons of some sort hailing from the island of Urborg, and the set\u2019s accompanying fiction clarifies that these specific Night Stalkers are members of the assassin cult the Breathstealers. The mechanics of Urborg Panther<\/a> add a final dash of intrigue: the Night Stalkers are able to summon a powerful demon called the Spirit of the Night<\/a> (which, as Mark Rosewater has explained<\/a>, was originally called \u201cSpirit of the Nightstalker\u201d). This little trio gave some answers about what a Night Stalker was, but only barely.<\/p>\n

The type got a final breath of life\u2014plus a new name, \u201cNightstalker\u201d sans space\u2014in Portal Second Age<\/a> (plus one teeny gasp in Prophecy<\/a>), boasting eight cards illustrated by some of old-school Magic\u2019s greatest artists.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Three<\/p>\n

Here, Nightstalkers were conferred a slightly more coherent design: evoking Myrfors\u2019 original, they are lanky and bestial and have long pointed faces, and in keeping with P02\u2019s weird mix of high fantasy with steampunk technology, they tote rifles and ride strange mechanical walkers. Their incredibly sparse flavor text\u2014there are less than 50 words of flavor between all of them\u2014gives few hints about them besides the fact that they serve the malevolent Tojira and menace the White-aligend Alaborn. Still no answer: What IS a Nightstalker?<\/p>\n

Why, you might ask, does the Nightstalker type still exist? There is no Nightstalker Lord or Nightstalker Anthem that gives a boon to all of them, so there seems little mechanical coherence among them. They have little more worldbuilding coherence: given their muddy ambiguity, it seems they might readily be called Demons, as other Black-aligned entities from Urborg are. Or they might even be called Horrors\u2014a catch-all card type for creepy monsters, and one which, in fact, was retconned onto a whole ton of creatures in the Grand Update.<\/p>\n

In fact, there seems to be perhaps one singular reason, mechanically at any rate, why the Nightstalker card type still exists: the ridiculously overcosted sorcery (and also the first-ever typal mass reanimation spell in all of Magic)<\/a> Return of the Nightstalkers<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Return<\/p>\n

If you were to erase the Nightstalker creature type, you\u2019d need to create another type for Return of the Nightstalkers<\/a> to target (and even then, it\u2019d be a tremendously worse version of Patriarch\u2019s Bidding<\/a>).<\/p>\n

This wouldn\u2019t be entirely unthinkable; certainly the Grand Creature Type Update had previously changed some creatures\u2019 abilities. The aforementioned Goblin King, for example, was errata\u2019d to say that \u201cOther Goblins you control get +1\/+1\u201d (though, as a side note, this change meant that the card benefits from other Goblin typal effects, which is not how the creature was originally designed). Aysen Crusader<\/a> was even weirder: the card initially buffed the long-forgotten Hero creature type (not to return until the advent of Marvel\u2019s Spider-Man), and was changed to buff Soldiers and Warriors.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Such changes were fine enough, but evidently Return of the Nightstalkers<\/a> was a step too far, likely because Wizards couldn\u2019t find a way to change the Nightstalker type while also preserving the card\u2019s mechanical clarity.<\/p>\n

And so, by the grace of one awful card, Nightstalker survives as a creature type (in the archive, at any rate). And I, for one, am glad it does.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The type exists for the best reason, which is no good reason at all. Although Nightstalkers are basically meaningless from a modern mechanical perspective, they offer a glimpse into the foreign land that is late-90s Magic. Even more than that, they represent the purest kind of worldbuilding\u2014worldbuilding that has somehow outsmarted the demands of power creep and remained purely and\u00a0 flavorful. The Nightstalkers are strange quasi-demonic entities that may prowl the swamps of Urborg and Dakkmor to this very day, and they refuse to be anything other than themselves. Rather than conform to players, they ask players to conform to them.\u00a0<\/p>\n

There are quite a few other creature types that have achieved similar dark bargains and that are similarly fertile with history.<\/p>\n

\"Three<\/p>\n

Bringer<\/a> was a seemingly redundant creature type that united five Fifth Dawn creatures, each one the embodiment of one of Mirrodin\u2019s suns (we\u2019d likely now type them Avatars, and they\u2019d simply belong together as a cycle). Similar is the Volver type<\/a> from Apocalypse, which comprises a cycle of five mutated creatures that play into the set\u2019s wedge-mana-matters theme. Also from Apocalypse are all two cards boasting the Flagbearer<\/a> type, both designed with hilarious self-referential synergy. I love each of these types because they\u2019re intractable to the retroactive force of modern design: they refuse to behave the same way that other types do, refuse to be captured by the logic of efficiency and coherence.<\/p>\n

\"Four<\/p>\n

Although we\u2019re unlikely to see more Bringers, Volvers, or Flagbearers, there\u2019s more hope for Carriers<\/a> and Brushwaggs<\/a> and Starfish<\/a>, who are all populated by fewer than 10 creatures but who have all seen reprints and even new additions in the last several years\u2013some in nostalgia-oriented products like Modern Horizons, but some in \u201creal\u201d sets like Outlaws of Thunder Junction. Like one incredibly funny Magic writer whose work you should be reading,<\/a> I hold out the same hope for Phelddagrifs<\/a>. Their case is the inverse of the Nightstalkers\u2019: rather than remain locked in the archives, some of these creature types can walk again; in them, there\u2019s the thrilling sense that even history\u2019s leavings are alive.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Indeed, as the afterlife of the Grand Creature Type Update demonstrates, no amendation is ever permanent. Gottlieb himself said as much in the debut article:<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd you know what? We probably didn\u2019t do it perfectly. When you\u2019re updating nearly 1200 cards, there are probably some things that slipped through the cracks. There are certainly issues that are ambiguous.\u201d<\/p>\n

In some cases, the GCTU erased certain creature types that were later brought back, or vice versa. \u201cAnemone,\u201d for example, was added for Glowing Anemone<\/a> but then eliminated and bundled into \u201cJellyfish,\u201d while the \u201cHyenas\u201d type of Gibbering Hyenas<\/a> was eliminated but later reintroduced as \u201cHyena.\u201d Much this transformation, by the way, played off outside the cards\u2019 boundaries: neither Glowing Anemone nor Gibbering Hyenas have ever been reprinted, so this cosmic nominalist drama was essentially hypothetical. The update is as much a shared fiction as an actual change.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, some creature types began as fictions and then became realities.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Two<\/p>\n

This is the case with numerous types that debuted in Un-sets, but were then eventually printed on regular Magic cards. Unhinged\u2019s Eager Beaver<\/a> scurried so that Thunder Junction\u2019s Giant Beaver<\/a> could scurry slightly faster, while Infinity\u2019s Vegetation Abomination<\/a> piloted the possibility that creatures, too, may be food. Indeed, Un-set type line innovations have been invaluable as Magic has expanded beyond conventional high fantasy: since the Robot creature type debuted in the jokey Unfinity, there have been over 130 \u201cserious\u201d Magic cards printed with the type, largely in Universes Beyond collaborations but some in-world, like those of Edge of Eternities.<\/p>\n

At the same time, some types will probably not live to see daylight again.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Nameless<\/p>\n

I suspect that Wizards will not be printing another member of the Nameless Race<\/a>, the only creature in Magic with no creature subtype at all, aside from more art of a certain American animated character inspired by it.<\/p>\n

All these micro-histories should interest us because they reveal the strange seams that knit Magic together. Creature typing has, from the beginning, been suspended between a matter of fantasy flavor and a matter of mechanical clarity. Should a creature that plainly is a Goblin be typed as a Goblin? Should a creature type with no mechanical purpose still be printed? Can a seemingly unserious type suddenly provide the infrastructure for hundreds of cards?<\/p>\n

Such questions speak to the way that, beneath their veneer of unchangeable, indisputable authority, rules are always mutable\u2014and always involve players\u2019 imaginations more than we might think. Despite the apparent power and obvious necessity of a comprehensive rulebook, there will always be little sparks that flit through the fireplace grate\u2014and that can birth whole new worlds unto themselves.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m reminded here of Gerard Manley Hopkins\u2019 poem \u201cInversnaid,\u201d one of my favorites. An ode to the roaring and unruly nature of Scotland, it ends like so:<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat would the world be, once bereft<\/p>\n

Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,<\/p>\n

O let them be left, wildness and wet;<\/p>\n

Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.\u201d<\/p>\n

These lines capture the strange, beautiful oddness of the card types I\u2019ve surveyed here. Unruly and resistant, and yet\u2014as rendered in poetic language\u2014harmonious, rhyming, sonorous, echoing. They refuse to be contained, and in their refusal they birth whole new worlds for us.<\/p>\n

So here\u2019s me, hoping to see another Nightstalker card printed in 2027\u2014or not. Long live the woods and the wilderness yet.<\/p>\n

Ryan Carroll (he\/him)<\/b> is a writer and Ph.D. candidate in English and Comparative Literature. On Substack as Dominarian Plowshare<\/a>, he writes about Magic\u2019s art, story, and experience. Outside of Magic, he writes on topics including 19th-century literature, information theory, television politics, and cliche.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Did you know that Living Wall counts as a wall? Did you know that Lead-Belly Chimera counts as…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":923690,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[23],"tags":[746,350289,159,372790,67,132,68,372791],"class_list":["post-923689","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-environment","tag-game-design","tag-science","tag-typal","tag-united-states","tag-unitedstates","tag-us","tag-vortho"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116891349308110336","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/923689","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=923689"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/923689\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/923690"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=923689"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=923689"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=923689"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}