For a while I played a weird homebrew format cooked up by the old WotC Flavor and Storyline board not unlike Commander. The big difference from Commander was that instead of a creature in the command zone you had, in emulation of the modern Planeswalker cards, three instants or sorceries that you could replay repeatedly. My deck was an attempt to create something simultaneously degenerate and monumentally silly, to test the boundaries of the format while also, well, goofing off. With that paired aim, it shouldn't be too surprising that the strategy I went with involved goblins.

Lots and lots of goblins.

This isn't a diss against goblins. Orcs these days sort of blur together from one fantasy property to the next. In a double blind test I'm not entirely sure I could tell you whether some big blue orc-like thing is from World of Warcraft or one of the dreadfully dull ice orc things Game of Thrones uses in place of the books' menacing, alien Others. Goblins, though . . .  goblins are diverse. Goblins are weird. Look at the sheer variety of them in Labyrinth! And then again, look at their differences from the weird crocadilian creatures of the Hildebrandt Brothers or the floppy-eared variety of Bruce Coville's Goblins in the Castle! Goblins, freed from having to be shallowly badass, can be as comically strange as they like.

Certainly their morphology in Magic is all over the map. We have, just off the top of my head: the more "generic" looking goblins on Dominaria and Ravnica, the tall, elfin schemers of Mercadia, the shovel-faced and remarkably stupid (even for goblins!) Moggs of Rath, the somewhat Froud-esque goblins of Lorwyn, the shell-backed angular Akki of Kamigawa, the furred and feral goblins of Tarkir which–

This is most logically explained by changing style guides and less concern for consistency than I'd prefer. We've already had the whole Watson and Doyle talk. But the fact that ONE instance is definitely intended in-canon (the presence of the mana-amplifying artifact the Mirari on Otaria transformed the goblins of the Skirk Ridge into something bestial and ratlike) makes me want to play with the idea that maybe goblins are just particularly prone to weird mutation. When Slobad was killed (off-screen) by his fellow goblins after the end of Mirrodin, the Mirari fell somewhere into the depths of the plane. Could it have churned away in the depths, altering goblin physiognomy?

It's not like goblins have slow population turnover, so it probably wouldn't take that long for mutations to show up. That's one of the things consistent across all the different worlds in Magic; one of the well-established sources of Goblin comedy alongside their apparent love of rocks. Goblins live in warrens, have huge families, and don't worry too much when a few of them get blown up. My experimental deck made heavy use of this: I had an inkling that if anything could be broken through repeated use, it was probably going to be token-production, and what better test case than a card like Empty the Warrens, a card designed to produce as many damn goblins as possible? That was the whole deck, really: a goblin storm monstrosity designed to just spew out goblin tokens, and hurl them at my opponent's face because, well, there's always more goblins, right?

I had cards from all over the Multiverse in that deck; from Dominaria, Ravnica, Kamigawa, Alara . . .  wherever you can find goblins, there's spells to summon more and more goblins. In their card art they look radically different, of course, but the deck felt plenty cohesive (albeit cohesively stupid and absurd). This is the real secret of goblin design. Goblin iconography can be fast and loose in part because goblins are defined by their slapstick antics more than anything. They be extravagantly weird because they don't have to look particularly menacing or be overly concerned with silly things like "player identification." They can also rely on their place in Magic's narrative to make the essence under warty skin apparent.

Their place is, of course, being both pretty thick and a bit crap.

Note that all of those examples of goblins being ragged on by their own cards are from just the first page of Gatherer results. And I skipped a bunch too.

That's not to say that the cards are bad – there's some real powerful goblin cards – but in the context of flavor constantly emphasizing their goofiness, winning with goblins doesn't feel like winning with a big dragon to the head. They're small, expendable, tend to have mechanics that revolve around blowing things up, and often are a way for Red to do stuff outside its mechanical pie at some cost or other. Why does it cost so much more to get some effect than it would for another color's magic? Well, because if Red wants an air balloon fleet it's gotta rely on, ugh, goblins.

Taking that much joy in my goblins can be a bit of an issue, though, when paired with their abject nature. Being fond of them, while also seeing their crappiness described over and over again on the cards, is a real recipe for both pathos and cognitive dissonance. I don't think I'm the only player to end up feeling weirdly affectionate toward my gobbos and with that affection comes some sympathy for their condition. Certainly the storyline has plenty of examples of heroic goblins. We might mention the Ravnican goblin Crix, for example, or our first goblin Planeswalker Daretti, Scrap Savant. Those aren't goblins I think anyone's eager to launch from a catapult.

Those storyline goblins have often had a tough time, though. Slobad stands out as receiving remarkably poor treatment from the storyline: the skilled artificer is killed off screen between blocks so the utterly tedious Glissa could have a reason to go full Phyrexian. So much for the character who gave up a Planeswalker spark to save his entire world. Beloved Weatherlight mascot Squee might well have achieved lasting immortality beyond even the Lord of the Wastes Himself, but he had to suffer through Crovax killing him a whole bunch. Tivadar of Thorn's genocidal crusade against goblins, meanwhile, is pretty unambiguously played for horror at least on the cards of The Dark. Goblin Grenade is funny. A goblin crucified on a banner with its entrails dangling is not.

It's probably this sense of sympathy with goblins that led RA Salvatore, writing for a different WotC property, to center an entire short story on the dark elf Drizzt witnessing the lynching of an exceptionally smart and good goblin and to make that story a core motivating force for Drizzt in more recent Forgotten Realms books. There's only so much abuse we can heap on goblins, it seems, before the darker implications of having a designated narrative punching bag become uncomfortably visible. Isn't our own history full of treating human beings, in our cultural narratives, the same way we treat goblins, after all?

Of course, part of the problem comes from the fact that goblins are both literally inhuman and not real. If goblins have a tendency to slip back into the cartoonish, the fact that they're not far removed from literally being cartoons must be part of it. To try to address the oppression of things that are not only purely imaginary, but also, within the context of the fantasy potentially quite distinct from humans in terms of their perceptions of the world, puts us firmly in Don Quixote territory. That's foolishness perhaps worthy of a goblin.

Or . . .  perhaps this foolishness is not very goblin-like at all. Goblins aren't exactly renowned for overthinking things. The embodiment of Red, goblins tend to just leap after whatever feels right in the moment. Maybe this is the proper approach to goblin semiotics: don't worry too much about whether goblins can be made into a coherent symbol, just roll with whatever they make you feel at the moment. If nothing else, that's probably good for goblins; since a lot of players seem to respond to goblins with the feeling "I should be casting more goblins." If sometimes a goblin serves as pathos and other times as slapstick, perhaps that's not so much a contradiction as totally in the spirit of goblin psychology. Hey, Goblin Psychologist, now THAT'S a card concept with potential!

I do think the surprisingly complex emotional content of the gerbs is going to continue being a weird issue not just for Magic but for its whole sort of subset of fantasy. Maybe that's why it's been so long since they've shown up in Magic's main sets. I hope whatever's keeping them away doesn't last too much longer though. No matter what direction goblins go in, slapstick or sympathetic or both, we can always use more goblins.