There are tends of thousands of cards in Magic the Gathering, hitting every genre and theme you can think of. There's the sci-fi of Kaladesh and the upcoming Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty, the comedic Un-sets, the College drama of Strixhaven, and even the cinematic, universe-hopping chaos of the War of the Spark.
But one of the genres Magic has consistently done so well in its almost 30-year history has been horror. Body horror, cosmic horror, gothic horror, some of the game's most iconic cards are also its creepiest. Just in time for Halloween, here are Magic the Gathering's top 10 scariest cards.
10 Creepy Doll
Creepy Doll is a classic of the Magic horror genre. Introduced in the first Innistrad set, it's an unassuming, 1/1, indestructible doll… unless you're particularly unlucky and it's suddenly able to kill anything it deals combat damage to.
Old dolls are creepy, but the idea of a doll only being a doll sometimes is terrifying. It's difficult to tell from the art whether the doll is freeing its partner from its restraints… or has just mutilated it with that pair of scissors. This is a card brimming with uncertainty, making it incredibly uncomfortable to look at.
9 Thought Scour
Even just from the art, Thought Scour is brutal. A person being forcible lobotomised by sharp, hideous machinery, it's one of the worst fates imaginable. And then you find out who Stitcher Geralf on the card's flavour text is.
Geralf is a Skaaberen from the plane of Innistrad, obsessed with making the perfect 'skaab': a creature formed from the remains of corpses. Think Frankenstein, only he makes enough of them to wage zombie wars with his necromancer sister, Gisa. The flavour text is him giving instruction on how he creates his monsters, telling an unknown person to not "let the moaning bother you, it will soon become music to your ears".
8 Abomination of Llanowar
After a year of relatively lighter sets, like Theros: Beyond Death, Ikoria, and Zendikar Rising, we were suddenly given Abomination of Llanowar in Commander Legends, and it was one heck of a tonal shift in the best possible way.
The Abomination of Llanowar is a folk tale from Dominaria that tells of a horrifying mass of Elf flesh roaming through the forests of Llanowar. To make it even more horrific, the Abomination is made of both living and dead elves: the living begging any elf it comes across to run away, while the dead trying to coax them in closer.
Vincent Proce's art sells this mix of living and dead incredibly, as, while some faces are clearly living or dead, there are too many who could fall either way, implying nobody would know which mouths to trust…
7 Ad Nauseam
Ad Nauseam is terrifying for a whole number of gameplay reasons, with entire "Adnaus" decks based around playing it for an easy win. However, have you ever stopped to just look at Ad Nauseam? It's the worst.
The more you look at Ad Nauseam, the worse it gets. The eyes pinned wide open, the mummified flesh, the lacerated lungs, the weird device embedded into his forehead, his hands reduced to stumps, forcing him to surgically attach the brushes to his arms and use his own blood as ink. There's so much going on here, and then you notice he's just drawing the same symbol over and over and over, well into undeath.
6 Phyrexian Unlife
The Phyrexians are Magic's go-to source of endless body horror. From the "Machine Hell" plane of Phyrexia, they use their black oil to convert any living thing it can get its hands on into warped, mechanical nightmares. They've even worked out how to travel between planes, with any it comes into contact with running the risk of being completely overwhelmed.
At first glance, Phyrexian Unlife isn't all that creepy. It's a lady wearing a mask, right? Wrong. It shows somebody being taken over and converted by the Phyrexian Oil, their eyes locked in a state of pure terror behind the cracked porcelain masks most associated with the sadistic Phyrexian Praetor, Elesh Norn.
What's more, the implications from what the card does make it even more horrific. You can't lose the game by having zero or less life, but any damage done to you is through the Phyrexian mechanic of Infect. Living things being corrupted by the Phyrexians don't die, they're twisted into these things until their minds break and they 'accept' their fate.
5 Terror
Terror is such a simple card that was first printed way back in Magic's first set, Alpha. And yet, there's something so, so creepy about it.
A withered husk lay screaming in the foetal position, surrounded by a black void. Their hair is long and grey, their eye bloodshot. It's impossible to tell how long they've been there, and, even more scarily, we don't know what's put them in that state. The off centre-subject and the pure black backdrop contrasted by a single, bulging, white eye make it so visually striking, making it one of the early game's most recognisable cards.
4 Surgical Extraction
Surgical Extraction is one of a long list of cards that uses body horror for dramatic effect, but there's something hauntingly beautiful about it. Steven Belledin's art feels almost like something you'd find in one of the quiet spaces on a Yes album cover: an endless, cracked desert contrasted by an ominous, endless, purply-blue sky.
Of course, there's also the obvious in that somebody has just had their skull and spine removed using some sort of medical device. Are they dead or just paralysed? Why is this happening in an empty desert? Either way, the thought of your skull looking at the back of your head is an absolute nightmare.
3 Claustrophobia
There are a lot of cards that eschew the fantastic elements of the game in exchange for playing up the visceral, deep-seated fears people have in the pit of their guts. None of them are as effective at prodding those feelings as Claustrophobia.
Being buried alive is one of the most common fears a person can have, and Ryan Pancoast has really driven home why. The dark, monochromatic colour pallet, the incredibly tight angel, the look of terror, and the desperate claw marks on the roof of the coffin all add up to make a card that causes immediate anxiety whenever it turns up. The flavour text doesn't help: "six feet of earth muffled his cries".
2 Treacherous Urge
Somehow, artist Steven Belledin managed to take a wooden puppet and turn it into one of the most horrific sights in the entire game with Treacherous Urge. A screaming puppet, suspended from barbed wire, sawing itself in half as its face is fixed into a look of utter, wide-eyed agony. There's something even more horrific about this being an "urge", putting itself through this pain just because it had a brief whim or compulsion.
Though this list is looking more at the flavour of the cards, it also fits really nicely with what the card does: you gain control of a creature in an opponent's hand, give it haste so it can hit its owner, and then callously sacrifice it at the end of the turn. Everything about this card is just awful, which is what makes it so good.
1 Feed The Serpent
Though Magic is full of cosmic horror courtesy of the Eldrazi, Feed the Serpent from Kaldheim presents an entirely different take on it. In the world of Kaldheim, the Cosmos is the space between the ten realms, and in it lurks the Koma, the Cosmos Serpent. An indestructible, endlessly-replicating, mind-shatteringly enormous snake.
The art for Feed the Serpent really hammers home the sheer scale of Koma, and the flavour text adds so much to it: before you die, you're driven mad by being faced with the size of the Cosmos itself. It combines the usual fear of being eaten with tinges of cosmic horror and a massive dose of megalophobia to make it by far the scariest card not only released in 2021, but ever.