This pet is magic indeed. He has always been a vanishingly rare pet too. Why is he so rare? The answer to that question is typically always either ‘fishing’ or ‘TCG’, and in this case, it’s fishing. And whoa boy, is it fishing.

This guy went live in Burning Crusade. Like almost everything that went live in Burning Crusade, there are several steps to this process, and they’re all a massive pain.

Step 1 – As you can make catches from pools at any level of fishing, it is no longer necessary to grind your fishing to max and find a bunch of upgrade gear and lures and crap. You must still have a flying mount though, with the exception of some bonkers ways you can get to the location via engineering. But just, no. Flying mount.

Step 2 – Go to Terokkar Forest. Go to any water accessible only via a flying mount. Find a Highland Mixed School. Fish in it.

Step 3 – Fish in it until the pool runs out. Go find a new pool.

Step 4 – Repeat step 3 until you wear your fishing keybind to a nub.

Step 5 – Miracle of miracles, the RNG Gods smiled on you and you caught a Mr. Pinchy! I’m obviously being hyperbolic here, but not totally. At his launch during BC, Mr. Pinchy had roughly half the chance to drop from any cast in a pool as a Sea Pony does, I believe his drop rate is now increased, but that doesn’t take away that feeling of ‘OH THANK GOD FINALLY.’

Step 6 – Make sure you have at least 1 bag slot open to catch your crawdad, and use one of your wishes to Mr. Pinchy.

Step 7 – Be annoyed because he gives you a crummy level 70 buff. Be even more annoyed because now he has a 24 hour cooldown. That cooldown is internal by the way, so if you catch 2 today, you won’t run out of wishes until almost a week from today. Hooray! ish.

Step 8 – Use all 3 of your wishes. Mr. Pinchy disappears. OH FOR THE LOVE OF LITTLE GREEN APPLES.

Step 9 – repeat all that crap until you finally get a Magical Crawdad!

Why would you want him? Uh, the prestige? Filling out your stable?

A better answer would be that he makes an excellent tank. You can choose between the typical tank abilities Shell Shield & Renewing Mists, and he’s one of two pets with the very interesting heal ability Wish. The latter is very powerful, and makes him not only a good tank but an excellent support healer, since you can swap pets between when he casts it and it hits. Nearly any time I rave on about my fantastic crab you can use the flashier Crawdad instead.

So, why did I choose a crab? Look, did you even read the rest of this post? Sigh. Besides all that, the reason I go with the crab even though I have a crawdad is because I find the combo of shield + mists easier to manage (ie, I barely have to pay attention) in pve than Wish, even though Wish is a better heal, especially for higher health pets. If you want a tank pet for PVP though, consider a Crawdad.