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Insects (which includes beetles, ants, wasps, maggots, roaches, robotic ants, centipedes, a Giant Solifuge, and whatever Clickslither is supposed to be, but oddly enough not Spiders)

it's not particularly odd actually, since spiders aren't insects. solifuge is a bit odd, though, since he looks quite a bit like a spider and his name is derived from an order of arachnida.

edit: and centipedes aren't insects, either. thanks wikipedia!

Sep 21, 2010 -- 11:18PM, willpell wrote:

There are cases of the card being precisely identical save for name and set, I just can't think of one exactly.

Those instances are all over the damn place.
Flame Burst / Kindle
Armageddon / Ravages of War
Fyndhorn Elves / Llanowar Elves
Greenweaver Druid / Fyndhorn Elder
...and many more!

On the subject of insects, I can think of a kind of creaky rationale why centipedes count but spiders don't (scorpions also don't and this rationale fails there, but oh well).  The insects of Magic tend to be large for insects but not for Magic creatures in general; most seem to range from dog-size to person-size to somewhat-larger-than-person size ( Goliath Beetle is one of the very few that suggests being much larger than a person in its flavor text, but the art contains no size cues to support that).  Spiders, conversely, seem to start at the size of a tree and go up; in a rare example of real-world measurements, Plated Spider is explicitly forty feet tall, and the original art of Giant Spider shows it towering over a castle.  So in general, I'd say creatures of type Spider are in a size class consistent with giants and dragons, while creatures of type Insect are more in the humanoid size range ( Gigapede and Vexing Beetle being among the few exceptions).  That's a fairly decent rationale for them not overlapping, even if it fails in some practical details.  Surely there must be spiders about the same size as Ironshell Beetle , but we mostly see the ones that are genuinely immense, so the creature type mostly represents those, and thus the exceptions largely don't get made into cars.  You could also suggest that spiders routinely get this size while insects don't due either to evolutionary pressures (insects breed en masse, while spiders routinely eat each other so that only a few will survive in an area), or to spiritual/divine causes (the Spider Mother Ananasa devours the Animal Fathers of the insect tribes so they are never able to grow as powerful as her children), or to magical engineering by wizards (guardian spiders are more useful in general than guardian assassin-bugs, so they get created and gigantized more frequently from one plane to the next).