Magic's Best Moms
Mother of Runes by Livia Prima
Every Little Cub Has its Mother's Teeth to Guard It
Danzig isn't the only one who cares about mothers. We here at Commander's Herald do. too.
That's why, in honor of Mother's Day in the USA, we're showing our appreciation for all the moms out there in the only way we know how: with esoteric Magic: The Gathering references.
So if you're a mom, if you have a mom, if you know a mom, or are one of those people who get banned on social media for your inability to filter your obsession with Elesh Norn, this one's for you.
Best Overall Mom
This one's a no-brainer. Unless you're completely green to Magic, the moment an opponent taps a white mana and says "mom's home" (maybe that phrasing is regional, but the point stands), you know exactly which card is coming. Mother of Runes has been Magic's premier mom since Urza's Legacy in 1999, sipping her tea and explaining to her little guy there in the corner about all the ways her children disappoint her.
And since she debuted back in '99 with the now-iconic Scott Fischer art, we've seen six other artists do their part to honor Magic's best mom, five of which are courtesy of Secret Lairs. I'm partial to Rebecca Guay's primal version of motherhood, but I've got friends who swear by Magali Villeneuve, as they do for most things. Oddly, though, none of the newer versions include mom's striped-sock-donning, quill-wielding li'l guy.
And like all good moms, Mother of Runes is always there for we Commander players. She's played in 135,124 decks according to EDHREC, or nearly one in every ten decks playing white. That's way more than the fake mom, Giver of Runes, which only appears in 49,332 decks. You're not my mom! is a mantra Commander players share with edgy teens worldwide.
Best Wacky Grandma
There will be a small contingent of people reading this that take one look at Ravi Sengir and be taken back to a simpler time, a time when your parents dropped you off at grandma's for the weekend, and she shambled out onto the porch to greet you, cigarette in one hand and TV remote in the other. You get a hug, a clamp on the cheek by the fingers not pinching the cigarette butt, and a promise of macaroni and cheese. You wave goodbye to your parents as they depart in the station wagon. It's going to be a good weekend.
That's what Grandmother Sengir promises. She's going to say some things that your parents would prefer she not say, she's going to teach you how to iron a shirt with the assumption that if you burn yourself you had it coming, and she's going to leave you unsupervised in the back seat of her car for three-and-a-half hours while she gets her perm. Like I said, there'll be a small contingent for whom this resonates. If that's not you, I'm sorry.
Those for whom it does were lucky. They were born into having a Grandmother Sengir. But for others, kidnapping is an option too, as the lore of Homelands teaches us. Ravi's not really the grandmother of Baron Sengir, but rather an abducted former planeswalker adept in red, green, and black magic. She and the Baron are actually the same age.
The sole survivor of the ringing of the Apocalypse Chime, Ravi lost her mind after being locked in a coffin for centuries before the Baron found her. As Ravi herself says, "I do enjoy a good apocalypse."
Sadly, there are only 23 decks in all of EDHREC dedicated to Magic's best wacky grandma. Maybe for Mother's Day, we should get those numbers up a bit.
Of course, an honorable grandma mention goes to Eunice Blackblade, who got up to some wacky stuff in her own right.
Best Animal Mom
There were plenty of options for this category. There's Duskana, the Rage Mother, a newer mom and part of the current Magic Bearenaissance we're seeing. There's also Mother Bear, a card that elicits a disproportionate amount of negative feelings for a draft common.
Then there's Sakiko, Mother of Summer, who it could be argued that, while an animal herself, she's actually a parent to an abstract concept and not more snakes, and Ishkanah, Grafwidow, who we know is a mom thanks to her Arena variant, but that doesn't count. (Here I am invalidating the experience of arachnid motherhood on Mother's Day weekend.)
And we can't forget The Goose Mother, but as someone who lives in an area where Canada Geese congregate year-round, I refuse to provide accolades to those awful, hissing sky carp.
Anyway, there are a lot of four- (or six-, or eight)-legged moms in Magic. But the best of them all is Dragon Broodmother. A mother's job is to provide for her children, and what better way to do that than to feed her smaller children to her bigger ones? Sure, you could allow her little Dragon offspring to devour other creatures, but come on. That's not what you do when you cast a Dragon Broodmother. You make one token on the next two players' upkeeps, then you feed them all to the third one. As an oldest child, I have qualms with this method of child-rearing, but I'm also not a mother, so who am I to judge?
Best Mom to Animals
A mother's love transcends species. We've learned that through saccharine GIFs of mother dogs taking care of tiny orphan kittens on Facebook, and we've learned that by watching Alien: Resurrection. But in Magic, we learned that in the flavor text of Gavi, Nest Warden. Like, word for word.
Native to Ikoria, Gavi was chosen by an orphaned litter of Cat Dinosaurs, and through that bond became a surrogate mother to hordes of Ikorian behemoths. Gavi's living proof that if you want to be a mom, there's the conventional means, sure, but there's always the outside chance that, during a woodland meander, you stumble across a newly hatched brood of monsters who need a mom, and bam, right place right time.
Don't actually try that in real life, please.
Most Misunderstood Mom
All the Sliver Queen cared about was taking care of her thousands and thousands of kids. I can barely keep tabs on my dog throughout the day, so I do not envy her monumental task. (Or is it mom-umental? Eh? Eh.)
It's true that Sliver Queen is really just a Sliver Queen, and not the Sliver Queen. We know Slivers did not originate on Rath, where this particular Queen resided, so we can surmise that there are others. There's also Sliver Gravemother, who according to lore is the first true Sliver Queen, and current ruler over that unnamed plane of Sliver origin.
But our Sliver Queen, the one we know and love from Stronghold, didn't really start on Rath either. She was kidnapped by a primary antagonist (I promise this isn't a mother's Day subtheme), this time Volrath. It was he who placed the Queen as an obstacle for our Weatherlight heroes' quest to reclaim The Legacy, and as a result, Sliver Queen was a pawn in the machinations of a dude named Vuel. This is all common knowledge if you're old and complete gibberish if you're not.
All that really matters is that, to Sliver Queen, every Sliver was her child, and she loved them all. And it was that love that forged a connection between her and Karn, Silver Golem. As the Slivers were a part of her, The Legacy was a part of him, and she understood that. If that's not motherhood, I don't know what is.
Best Incorporeal Mom
Like Ravi Sengir, but not insane and mostly evil. Instead, Kindly Ancestor just wants you to be your best self, but like all matronly figures will chide you for going outside without a coat. Unlike most moms, though, she will actually become your coat if necessary.
Most Compleat Mom
No list of Magic's Best Moms would be compleat without mention of Elesh Norn, for better or worse. The high authority of the Machine Orthodoxy, Elesh Norn fancies herself the mother of all Phyrexia, which is a lofty position that left her with a Multiverse-sized ego and a desire to be the mom of everybody. Even you. Yes, you.
She's dead now, thanks to Karn, who has quite the history dealing with moms despite his status as a being who never had one (unless you count Urza, I guess). Elesh Norn's mothering style is more Joan Crawford than Marmee March. Motherhood, like all dictatorships, chooses a velvet palm or iron fist, and Elesh Norn's got a thing for metal.
Perhaps that's why Norn's got the fan club she does. Mother's Day isn't exactly about moms like Norn, but if you're looking for a reason to throw your phone into the river, Google "Elesh Norn mommy."
Best Elf Mom
There are 133 legendary Elves in Magic, and a significant number of them could be mothers. I'm not going to read the lore of every one of them. Is Queen Allenal of Ruadach a mom? I don't know, and it's not my place to speculate.
But when it comes to Marwyn, it's pretty evident that she's mommin' around the forest. Wait, this just in: Marwyn isn't a mom? She's just a midwife?
Well, isn't that interesting. What, then, determines motherhood? Is it she who brings into the world a new life, or she who provides that life with nurturing? Or both? There's no rule that says one person is limited to one mother or one familial composition, and that's true for real life as it is for fictional elves. That little elvish jelly bean on Marwyn's chest in her art may not have been birthed by her, but is she not eligible for motherly accolades, too?
So sure, Marwyn might or might not be a mom in the biological sense, just like Queen Allenal may or may not be. There's nothing that says one way or the other, as far as I can tell. But Marwyn's still a mom in my book.
Best Incognito Mom
We know Jaya now as the pyromancer from all the snarky red card flavor text who reappeared in more recent years only to be unceremoniously killed off as a minor plot point. But for a time, she was also a mother.
Back in her time at Keral Keep, Jaya was known as Mother Luti. Jaya's one of those old planeswalkers who existed as a god for all intents and purposes prior to The Mending, and she was so powerful, in fact, that a brief visit to the plane of Regatha caused the residents there to worship her as such.
When she eventually returned many years later, she opted to stay, donning the guise of Mother Luti to become a spiritual advisor. In Regatha. To the people who worshiped her. Jaya was known for a lot of things, but humility wasn't one of them.
She was a mother to many at Keral Keep, in a spiritual sense. And that includes Jaya's story successor in Chandra, for a time.
Most Hotheaded Mom
Sometimes, as a kid, when you're in a pickle, you just want to call your mom and have her deal with it. Palladia-Mors is just that kind of mom, if the pickle you're in is being harassed by angry townsfolk, and the solution is to have a Dragon eat everyone with zero remorse.
Palladia-Mors makes the list because she's actually the mother of not one, but two other famous dragons: Rith, the Awakener and Darigaaz, the Igniter. Darigaaz, specifically, inherited his mother's steadfast, stubborn refusal to die, which means that if nothing else, Palladia-Mors had an impact on her spawn.
That lineage also means that Nicol Bolas is Darigaaz's uncle. That would be an interesting family reunion.
Most Mysterious Mom
The flavor text of Witch's Mist from Future Sight is the only known mention of "Overmother." Who are you, Overmother? Can you provide more detail about this "gelatinous hand" and "serrated heel"? Should I get you a Mother's Day card? Let me know by tomorrow.
Worst Overall Mom
We've talked about a lot of good moms today, in every sense of the word. But just because it's mother's Day doesn't mean bad moms get a pass. You have to earn your title as "mom".
Just ask Mirri, Cat Warrior.
We get a glimpse at Mirri's not-so-great relationship with her mom via the flavor text of Weatherlight's Uktabi Efreet:
That's in reference of Mirri's childhood, of course. Mirri was born with heterochromia, or two different colored eyes. Considered a bad omen by her feline village, Mirri's mother disowned her and, shortly thereafter, banished her from their forest home. She was still whatever you'd call the child version of a cat person at the time. Kit? Kindermeowtener? Whatever, it's not important.
Mirri was found and adopted by grumpy ol' Multani, Maro-Sorcerer, befriended Gerrard, and the rest is history. Literally.
So perhaps Mirri's terrible mom, in a roundabout way, allowed her to achieve her destiny. By, you know, abandoning her as a child. Maybe that was the plan all along. I don't know, I'm not a cat person.
S-Mothering Tithe
That's a lot of moms. Some could argue too many moms, but around so many moms I would lose any argument. Because you should never argue with your mom.
Were there any Magic moms I missed? I'd love to hear about them. I know there are more moms out there. And with June's Father's Day right around the corner, feel free to pitch your pick for Magic's Best Dads while you're at it. If you don't, I'll be forced to write 2,500 words on the relationship between Starke of Rath and his daughter Takara, and no one wants that (except me).
