I know I'm not the first person to bring this up, but seriously. Why aren't Merfolk Creature – Fish?

Leonin? Cats.
Loxodon? Elephant.
Nezumi? Rat.

I think it's pretty well established that everyone thinks this a serious problem.

Because Merfolk are a type of fish. You wouldn't label Leonin as mammals.

Probably because they aren't purely fish, biologically speaking.

See: Lorwyn Ponder art.

Because Merfolk are....Merfolk? Thats like asking why are elves, goblins, and orcs not human mutants.

Because Leonin are new and cats already existed but Merfolk are old and an original type?

Best of all, Naga are sometimes snakes and sometimes naga.

looks a lot like a merfolk to me and its a Fish Lizard

A flizzard! I also want to investigate why the average zombie isn't a zombie human, but there are zombie merfolk/goblins/etc.

@The-Atog-Lord said in Ichthyan Taxonomy:

Best of all, Naga are sometimes snakes and sometimes naga.

This is literally the worst thing ever. Naga should be snakes. Everyone reading this should immediately tab over to twitter (if they have it) and tweet mark rosewater that naga should be snakes. If you don't have twitter email him. If you don't have email go to wotc customer service and put in a complaint there.

@walking.dude With Ixilan on the horizon perhaps all lizard beasts should be dinosaurs as well:
http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Search/Default.aspx?action=advanced&subtype=+[lizard]+[beast]

@JonHammack If this were a Merfolk... ooo, the value with Merrow!

@Brass-Man This is pretty much exactly why I don't play as much magic as I did a year ago. Thank you for finally calling out the Loxodon in the room.

@The-Atog-Lord said in Ichthyan Taxonomy:

Best of all, Naga are sometimes snakes and sometimes naga.

Please don't mess with snakes ... in french cards, 'snakes' and 'serpents' are both translated as 'serpent' and i saw so many (well at least one actually) people get desperate when they find out that their tribal serpent deck was just falling apart.

@albarkhane This is just begging for a format where rules interactions are determined differently based on what it says in the language printed on the card. Imagine all the weird price spikes of random, badly translated Portuguese cards from the mid-2000's. And certainly if we can agree on anything, it's that MTG needs more formats and more rules complications.

And none of this really gets into the worst creature-type choice Wizards has made in years: All those stupid Gremlins should have been Atogs. People blame the decline in popularity of Magic on factors like terrible Standard decisions, poor card quality, and poor management of organized play. Those may be secondary factors, but I'm pretty sure the bulk of the blame lies on the shoulders of whichever person decided that Gremlins would be featured in Kaladesh over Atogs.

I always confused Atogs with Tribbles.

@Brass-Man said in Ichthyan Taxonomy:

I know I'm not the first person to bring this up, but seriously. Why aren't Merfolk Creature – Fish?

Leonin? Cats.
Loxodon? Elephant.
Nezumi? Rat.

I think it's pretty well established that everyone thinks this a serious problem.

According to that logic shouldn't humans then be Creature - Primate? I think that is the great discrepancy - if you differentiate humans and apes/ monkeys then you have to differ between fish and merfolk as well.

@Topical_Island
Actually, my post was not very serious and i was kidding but still pointing at some very bad translations in foreign languages which leads to some confusion and errors for casual players who won't double check everything. (the exemple i gave did happen actually).

However, if a format like that would exist and produce a tier 1 deck based on some obscure and stupid tribe i buy for it.

@albarkhane Firstly, I loved your post. Secondly, I'm willing to bet actual money that is was not less serious than mine - since that is impossible.

Merfolk are fish if centaurs are horses. I do agree though that WotC is really messing up their nomenclature, Linnaeus would roll over in his grave if he saw that a group led by a mathematician thought they knew how to classify creatures. This is just the tip of the iceberg though, they insist on making "shiny" cards. Just like the merfolk, I am not a fish and am not enticed by your shinies. Remember when they made Chris Pikula a woman? Or when Bob Maher became Jean-Baptiste Emanuel Zorg? For god's sake they printed trolls after Thrun. They need to be stopped, we need to secure our borders, and not just any borders, I mean pre-eighth borders.