Celebrating Shark Awareness Day

Cardmarket Insight sheds light onto the beautiful and fascinating deep blue world of pop culture's most infamous animals: Selachimorpha, more commonly known as sharks. In our world, the first of them appeared 100 million years before any dinosaur ever walked the face of the earth …

sharks

… and this timeline also holds true, roughly, for their appearance in the world of Magic. Only when from Alpha had its creature type updated and superseded from Ice Age as the game's first Dinosaur, did the prehistoric land animals pull ahead.

Giant Sharks in the Dark

If we go strictly by the wording on old paper, The Dark's illustrated by Tom Wänerstrand appeared before the former first Dinosaur. Either way, it is the very first Shark in Magic: The Gathering.

giant shark
"You're gonna need a bigger boat!"
—last words of the crew

is unsurprisingly a pretty realistic depiction of the most infamous shark subspecies known to men: the great white or Carcharodon carcharias. This shark shook the world of cinema by becoming the face of horror in the 1975 movie Jaws by Steven Spielberg. Quentin Tarantino recently crowned Jaws as the best movie of all times (from an entertainment perspective).

Roy Sheider in Jaws (1975)
Roy Sheider in Jaws (1975)

While you can undoubtedly make that case, one should not forget to mention that the movie played a role in the villainizing of this animal by portraying it as a "merciless killing machine." While it created interest on the one hand, it is said to be responsible for the tragic increase in shark hunting during that time, which is why Spielberg is quoted to regret the movie.

Okay, back to Magic …

Hammerhead Held Strong

The next Shark followed in Stronghold with the lovely . Like most of the following Sharks, this one is and was absolutely unplayable but also undeniably cute.

hammerhead shark

Simic Sharks Ahead

After Stronghold we did not see any new Sharks until the notorious Simic guild (starting with Return to Ravnica) decided to try Sharks in the field of . As evidenced by cards like , , and , the Simic also have a preference for hammerheads.

shambleshark sharktocrab

Hai Alarm in 2020

2020 was quite a year for Sharks in Magic: Guilds of Ravnica, M21, Commander: Ikoria, and Ikoria introduced plenty of new specimens to the game. While Hai Alarm auf Mallorca (2004) introduced the prehistoric Ralf Möller … sorry, the prehistoric giant shark megalodon to German television, M21 brought the aforementioned creature to Magic in . Sadly, the nice artwork is the only positive aspect of this version of the Megaselachus megalodon. The card is just too expensive for what it does. What a pity. I am sure that, if megalodon were still around, it would not be happy with this result.

spined megalodon

Command the Skies

The best known and most legendary Shark in the real world today is one twenty-feet-long female great white named "Deep Blue." Since Commander: Ikoria, Magic has to offer a legendary Shark (and Bird) also: . Partnering with the duo can make great use of looting effects like and .

Shabraz, the Skyshark brallin, skyshark rider

A Typhoon in Plain Sight

Then came Ikoria: Lair of Behemoths. and are fine, but the set went absolutely over the top with ! This may be one of the most hilarious cards in Magic's history, but it is able to back up its ridiculousness. Taking inspiration from Sharknado (2013) Wizards released the first shark-related enchantment.

shark typhoon shark typhoon

It pairs great with , creating a deck called Sharkstill, and remains the only Eternal-playable card in this listing. Without casting a spell, you can get a flying X/X Shark token, putting pressure on the opposing player and forcing them to break Standstill, which is the ultimate key to winning with this deck.

Legacy Sharkstill by Scott Krinninger, June 2023
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The Sharks March On

2022 and 2023 is and was all about Phyrexians, who famously stop at nothing. Not even Sharks. The multiplying is the first and probably the last Phyrexian Shark.

Chrome Host Seedshark

Outlook

Sharks made it into movies, the action figure business, and Magic but mostly into the amygdala, the part of our brain where fears are located. I really hope they will make it into our hearts instead. Remembering how many years these majestic creatures managed to survive, while so many species are going extinct, we should be thankful to share this planet with them.

I am not here to lecture anybody about anything, but maybe we should consider skipping the next redundant purchase and donate something to a relevant, trustworthy project in order to get spared from the karma of the next upcoming shark typhoon. We should not forget that a movie like Sharknado, B movie on the surface, can also be seen as disaster film, a parable on the contemporary times we live in. Nature reacts or, as French philosopher Francois-Marie Arouet, known as Voltaire, once asserted: "Men argue, nature acts."

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, not of Cardmarket.