Shadows over something 🌘
As I said last week, MTG has a huge number of Lovecraft references, there are even entire worlds that are imbued with an atmosphere of horror. For example, the dark and gothic world of Innistrad 🦇
In this world, everything has always been unsettling, and in one of the latest expansions, they even summoned an ancient, abominable Deity from another reality!
The series of these expansions is called "Shadows over Innistrad", which in itself is a bold reference to Lovecraft's story "Shadows over Innsmouth". In addition to the general atmosphere, the Ancient Deity and all sorts of distortions of space, objects and perception, these sets squeezed in a couple of direct references to the work of the gentleman from Providence 🤓
For example, the Rancid Rats card and its flavor text: "They're in the walls! Can't you hear them?" almost literally refer us to the story of Lovecraft "Rats in the Walls" - a very creepy story teaching us that sometimes it is better for us not to know the history of ancient estates and what our ancestors did there...
And the card "Cryptolith Fragment" and its reverse side "Aurora of Emrakul" (in MTG there are double-sided "transformer"-cards) keep an interesting flavor text:
“I felt compelled to take the twisted stone, and I abandoned my horse's burden to accommodate its weight. Now, its continued glow illuminates my home and warms my mind."
— Garner Kroft, Moorland farmer
This text alludes to Lovecraft's work "The Colour Out of Space", in which farmer Nahum Gardner and his family encounter a meteorite falling on their farm, a very creepy story, far ahead of its time and, by the way, this is the writer's favorite work ✨
And here is "Emrakul, the Promised End" herself, whose radiance and bad influence we discussed above, this is an Ancient Deity, very similar in its properties and manifestations to Yog-Sothoth, Shub-Niggurath or Cthulhu Lovecraft! In MTG, the analogues of the Ancient Gods are called Eldrazi - these are unpleasant creatures from other dimensions, very s
