The Wise Mothman | Art by Sergei Leoluch Panin

Another Settlement Needs Your Help!

Welcome back to the second article in our series covering the narrative, setting and flavour of the latest Magic: The Gathering expansion: Universes Beyond: Fallout.

My name is Joshua and I’m here to bring you existing Magic players up to speed when it comes to the Fallout setting, guiding you through the world we're visiting. As we’ve seen from Warhammer, Doctor Who and The Lord of the Rings, Wizards of the Coast puts an enormous amount of effort into making lore-accurate and game-appropriate renditions of beloved characters from these franchises and Fallout is no different.

 

 

We’ve already covered the Scrappy Survivors, so if you haven’t read that article be sure to go back for an overview of the wasteland and the people defending it. In this article, we’ll be looking at the mutants that now call the earth home. It’s time for a radical roundup of the Mutant Menace!

While nuclear fallout ravaged the surface of the earth, new nightmares flourished atop the world’s surface. Embracing the radiation and ruin and making themselves all the stronger for it. This deck is going to utilise the radiation itself to erode your opponents minds, milling their best cards and draining their life total all the while.

 

To Catch a Cryptid

 

Our face commander is one of the most esoteric denizens of the fallout setting, The Wise Mothman.

The Mothman is revered by the Cult of the Mothman in the Appalachian mountains, though in actuality there are many mothmen. Some of them are stalking, some vengeful and others wise. A creature festooned in folklore, depicted as a half-man half-moth that would guide the enlightened with knowledge from before the great war. The Mothman appears to the player character throughout Fallout 76 (which isn't the 76th game in the franchise, nor is it named as such because only 76 people played it).

Choosing The Mothman as your commander will allow you to slowly tick up the Geiger counter on your opponents with rad counters, as their minds melt away trying to comprehend what is happening to them (kind of like in Fallout 76, huh). The Mothman, surrounded by the Cult of the Enlightened would end up being one of the focus factions within the game. The Cult will perform frequent ceremonies to invoke the presence of The Wise Mothman, attempting to draw it to the Mothman Museum in the Appalachia setting to hear it's blessings and wisdom.

Admittedly, this is one of the stranger creatures to capture in cardboard form, but this did mean Wizards of the Coast were able to present us a preconstructed deck featuring around each of the more modern Fallout games. While The Wise Mothman might lack the charm of Dogmeat, it absolutely makes up for it in sheer weirdness. Showing us the weirdest things the wasteland has to offer is something that Fallout has no problem with at all. Creatures such as this one and, you know... The Lumbering Megasloth, are great at getting us to embrace the Wild Wasteland.

 

Super Mutants

Super Mutants are advanced humans, who were created by exposing a regular human to a biological element, the Forced Evolutionary Virus. This created a new breed of human, one that was overwhelmingly strong, with exceptional endurance as well as immunity to radiation and most diseases. Appearing in every Fallout game, Super Mutants are a hallmark within the series. Depending on the game, the Super Mutants have been depicted with varying degrees of intelligence, some possess regular human capabilities and form peaceful settlements. Peaceful Super Mutants such as Fawkes and Strong, the Brutish Thespian have been known to accompany the player character. Others are driven mad, borderline feral and act only as antagonists within the games.

The Super Mutants would bring with them many threats, their size and bulk for sure. Though, there’s something notable about an enemy that brings a tiny portable nuclear warhead launcher into battle with them. I couldn’t describe the madness of Fallout without showing you the Nuka-Nuke Launcher. Often carried into battle by Super Mutants who themselves are immune to the radiation. The creativity of the Fallout setting might only be matched by the creativity of the weapons within. I never thought we’d see a Magic card that implied the equipped creature would fire a nuclear bomb at our opponents, but that’s Universes Beyond for you! Anything can happen these days, but war… War never changes.

The Master, but not the Doctor Who One

 

We can’t talk about Super Mutants without talking about The Master, and I’m not talking about any of the Masters we met in Universes Beyond: Doctor Who. I’m talking about The Master, the antagonist of the original Fallout game. Once a man known as Richard Moreau, he became The Master once exposed to the Forced Evolutionary Virus. While The Master might have started off as one man, he ended up much like Abomination of Llanowar. A great myriad mess of several humans and mutants, all merged together and poised at the pinnacle of the Super Mutant Faction.

 

With the aim of uniting all the peoples of the wasteland under the glorious umbrella of the Super Mutant, it’s no surprise that The Master’s card rendition has him doing exactly that. Stealing the best creatures from your own, or your opponent’s graveyards and turning them into 3/3 Mutants is the Master’s plan and Magic’s plentiful ways of milling cards into the graveyard is how he’ll accomplish it.

 

Ghouls

So we know what happened to the humans who slept soundly in the vaults. Let’s see what happened to the humans who survived on the surface, in tunnels and caverns under the earth with prolonged exposure to radiation.

Despite their appearance, ghouls aren’t intrinsically evil or vicious. No more than any other human anyway in a post apocalyptic setting. That being said, some ghouls have unfortunately abandoned their humanity and sanity and roam the wasteland as feral killers.

There are myriad Ghouls within the Mutant Menace deck, allowing you to explore the full breadth of Ghoul physiology. The Feral Ghoul may often be found stalking abandoned train tunnels and lurking in caves. Driven utterly mad by vast radiation exposure these ghouls will never reason or bargain, they only think to kill and consume. Some ghouls, the ones most closely exposed to the radiation have become something otherworldly. Glowing One's are luminescent beings who expel radiation from their own bodies. Get close enough to a Glowing One and the radiation can Putrefy even the strongest wasteland wanderer.

Ghouls can be feared and ostracised by some for their appearance, but some ghouls continue to live happily alongside humans.

Immune to radiation and in some cases even healed in the presence of it, ghouls are a solemn forced adaptation of humankind in the presence of an inhospitable world. Wonderful and tragic at the same time.

 

Green Fingers

 

 

Ghouls ain’t all bad, and Harold is one of the best. Harold didn’t become a Ghoul through surviving the Great War out in the wasteland. He lived in a vault, in fact and roamed the wasteland as a human for many years. This was until he came into contact with the Master and turned into a ghoul-like mutant, set to wander the wasteland once more.

Harold is a positive force in the wasteland and will speak fondly of his travels to the player and form friendships with those he passes. I can imagine you have some questions though? Why on earth does the card depict a ginormous tree? Well, that’s where Bob comes in.

Once Harold was exposed to the Forced Evolutionary Virus, Bob started growing out of his head. Bob was a spall sapling, who sprouted from Harold’s skull. From small beginnings, Bob began to grow and grow eventually overwhelming Harold and rooting him in place. A cult called The Treeminders would one day find Harold, and grow to worship him as a beacon of life in the wasteland. Harold and Bob together show that not all mutants are evil and while there’s death in the wasteland, there’s also life.

 

What's that Coming over the Hill...

 

But, there’s mostly death and if you’ve played a Fallout video game you know exactly what I’m talking about here. Deathclaws are insane, often arriving when you least expect it. When you’re low on health or over encumbered and especially when you haven’t saved the game in a while (Don’t ask me how, these guys just know). Deathclaws are a ludicrously strong enemy in Fallout, and it wouldn’t be an article about mutants if I didn’t talk about them.

The best thing about Deathclaws is that they're the ‘good guy’s fault! They were created before the Great War by the United States as a combat threat. The plan was to mix animal stock together to create the ultimate predator. Unfortunately, the ultimate predator was too successful, escaped captivity and spread across America.

Deathclaws are lizard mutants that the Simic Combine would salivate at getting their hands on. Depicted in the deck throughout their life cycle. The Young Deathclaws might be a little easier for the player character to deal with, but the Alpha Deathclaw is another story altogether. Wizards’ depiction puts trample, menace and monstrous all on one card as well as an ability to destroy permanents when the creature enters the battlefield. That’s because when you see an Alpha Deathclaw you’d better run, or at least have several Stimpaks ready. Because that permanent that’s about to be destroyed? It’s probably you.

 

Casualties of War

Our second look at the world of Fallout comes to a close, but by no means have we seen all of the villains this setting has to bear. By the time this article comes out, Fallout will have been released into our own local game stores. We want to know, did you pick up any of the Fallout commander decks? How about some singles? Are you a fan of the series or is this your first time in the Commonwealth? Let us know in the comments section below. As always, I’m Joshua and if you’d like to keep up with me and talk cards you can do so here and here.

I’ll be back for part three very soon, where our rogues gallery continues with the Hail Caesar commander deck. We’ll tackle Caesar’s Legion and the world of New Vegas before finding out if there’s any hope left for the post-apocalyptic wasteland at all.

Thanks for reading, and as always keep a RadX handy!

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