A fan-favorite planeswalker who’s been missing for years might finally be coming back, as artwork from the next Magic: The Gathering set seems to tease his appearance. We won’t beat around the bush: it’s Garruk, the green-aligned warrior druid with the very big axe.
Garruk seems to be on Muraganda, the prehistoric plane we’ll pass through in MTG Aetherdrift. And… erm… I hate to tell you this, guys, but it looks like he’s been eaten by a slime.
While we can only see a silhouette in the artwork, it’s undeniably the MTG planeswalker Garruk in that big elephant blob. From the distinctive weapon, to the helmet, to the fur cloak on his shoulders, it’s a clear match.
Now, we don’t know for sure he’s been consumed. Perhaps Garruk is just standing next to the ooze, visible through its translucent mass. But that seems unlikely. The Planeswalkers Guide article where this image comes from has a paragraph that’s very telling:
“Oozes are containers that shape themselves to the memory of the beings they consume. The most intelligent among them are those who have consumed sentient beings…and display a rudimentary intelligence, echoing the being whose remains they process slowly and memories they absorb into their own being.”
Garruk is the first planeswalker ever designed, and was one of the first five planeswalkers released, in the MTG set Lorwyn. But while the rest of the Lorwyn 5 – Jace, Chandra, Liliana, and Ajani – have had an almost constant presence in the game’s plot, Garruk has faded into the background. Unless you count a non-canon Bloomburrow reprint where he was a badger, the last time he showed up on a new card was 2019, in Throne of Eldraine.
There are probably a few different reasons for this. Garruk has never fit neatly into the plot of Magic, and it’s always seemed like Wizards didn’t quite know what to do with him. He’s been a loner and often an antagonistic force, which didn’t really fit in with the Gatewatch arc with the Planeswalker superhero team. Then he was a Planeswalker hunter, and Wizards was scared to use him, as it’s loath to kill off main characters (as the miraculous survival rate in War of the Spark would demonstrate).
There was also a bit of controversy early on over a 2012 card with Garruk which depicted him threatening Liliana. Now, she had cursed him with these icky purple veins, and another card in the same set showed her beating him up, but the way the scene was depicted – particularly the way Liliana was sexualized in the piece – understandably made many people think of real world domestic violence, and Wizards ended up issuing an apology. This may have been why Garruk was moved to the background for a while, which then left Wizards unsure how to neatly resolve his storyline.
In the meantime, Garruk was replaced as top Green planeswalker by Nissa and then Vivien. Now that non-Planeswalkers can be just as important as those who hop between planes, he’s also competing with the hideous Loot as the face of green.
Muraganda is a good plane for Garruk to appear on, full of beasts and primal energy that seems right up his street (a metaphor Garruk wouldn’t like). I doubt Wizards plans to leave him in a big elephant blob, that would be a sad direction for his story to take, but is he coming back to the limelight?
The real deciding factor will be whether or not Garruk has lost his spark. On the one hand, the rest of the Lorwyn Five have all been kept on as planeswalkers, but as we’ve already discussed, Garruk is the black sheep of the family.
My suspicion is we are going to see a desparked Garruk creature card in Aetherdrift. After all, if Wizards is still doing the one planeswalker card per set thing, then that card surely has to be Chandra, Hot-headed Racer, or something like that, right?
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