Cass (18+)

To put this in perspective, the last time an American subgroup migrated at these rates was the Great Migration, in which roughly 6 million Southern Black people fled Jim Crow violence and repression. This occurred over a period of decades, in the face of political repression, systematic violence, and legal apartheid.

In its fastest decade, the 1940s, 1.5 million left the South—against a Southern Black population of roughly 10 million. Black America fled Jim Crow at about 1.5% a year, at a time when baseline inter-state mobility was higher than it was today.

The card's direct effect is obviously horny: a device that doesn't mind control any in-game components but instead directly targets and controls a player. Of course, it has to be a temporary effect, but I am still weird about temporary mind control, especially when it's flavored as being forced into a bulbous helmet filled with tentacular growths reaching into your every orifice. That's just hot!

But the common gameplay loop around it is hotter. It's only one turn, which is a powerful tempo swing, and usually a bit of material advantage, but not game winning on its own. But you know what *is* game winning on its own? Permanently mind controlling you. And if you have this mind control helmet around that you're forcing your enemy into once, it's just efficient to force your enemy to wear it forever. Unfortunately, there's no gameplay difference between permanent mind control and normal defeat on the match slips.

So, like, obviously, permanent mind control is hot, but it's really the story of it that's what makes me fantasize about it. Because the moment you see that helmet, you know what your opponent is trying to do. And it's not like they're likely to hide it. The machine they're building isn't just one helmet. It takes a whole complex factory to maintain the resources necessary to lock something like you in it forever. No, they're going to be spending the next ten to fifteen minutes building this machine in front of you, all for the purposes of permanently enslaving you in it. And you're going to have to watch, because what if they mess up. And every once in a while, if it looks like you might escape, they'll activate parts of it, temporarily controlling you, to stop you. It's almost like they're aligning it to you, measuring and calculating to figure out exactly what is needed to control specifically you. And you know all this, all that's going to happen, the moment your opponent takes out the helmet. So you'll be spending every minute up to your eventual demise desperately fighting to prevent that from happening.

But, what does the inside of the machine feel like? Strictly speaking, it's not permanent mind control, not truly. It's just controlling you during your turns. It's hard to interpret what exactly that means outside of the game. I like to think of it as only controlling you when you have energy. The helmet only activates when you have the power to do anything. At the in-between times, at night or in transit, or when you're exhausted after working for them, you're free to think about what's been done to you. Of course, this means that they have an obligation to make sure you're either too tied up to do anything then or too exhausted to try. But isn't that fun?

Another fun thing about this type of mind control in mtg is that there's an in-game component that represents your current plans and ideas, your hand. And, while you're mind controlled, your opponent can see all of your plans and ideas and manipulate them. They can think those ideas for you, and they see what new ideas you think of. They can sort through every thought in your head and put it in different boxes to make sure that no thought of resistance gets through. And I'm sure during those in between moments of freedom you'll try to think your way out of it, but by that point, even your own mind will be stacked against you. Isn't that fun?