Hanging Tree, Murderous Host - The Nightmare Before Christmas TCG

Branch for four?

This one is really creepy to me. Technically, it's just an anthropomorphic tree with skeletons dangling from its branches. Plants in general need a lot of work to accomplish being scary. It's not enough just to make them animate; there has to be something unnerving. When you try to make plants scary but fail, you get stuff like The Happening.

So why do I find this frightening? The ability. You can lower the tree's cost by 1 by discarding 1 character from your hand. You are making this thing cheaper by hanging your own characters! That's the flavor I get from this. Whether the lynching allusion is what the designers were really going for is unknown to me.

On a random note, had they called in an illustrator instead of taking film stills, I would have told the artist to show three skeletons instead of four. Why? To play this card for free you need to discard three characters. That's the maximum number since you can't pay a negative number. Three hangings, three skeletons.