ENTRY 08: POSSESSED GOAT & VILE MUTILATOR!

This is only the fourth "goat" card ever in the game! It's also a really fun way to include such a classic horror convention, without lifting it too straight; this goat was meant to appease a demon as a sacrifice, but the demon left it alive as a vessel and came back to take some tastier human souls instead, I guess! The card is played as a 1/1 white goat for one mana, but if you pay any three mana and discard a card, you can boost it up to 4/4 and turn it into a dual black & white demon goat! Hooray!

It looks a bit more like a mountain goat than a regular goat, which aren't AS taxonomically related as most people think. The goat itself has a couple of additional eyeballs forming, but looming behind it is a glimpse of the demon in question; a long-clawed entity with an animal skull and several luminous, pinkish eyes in each socket. Very cool, and it's not just a random demon either; it's almost definitely a demon with its own card, too!

How cool of a name is VILE MUTILATOR for a demon? When I was a kid, Magic: The Gathering got enough complaints from the Satanic Panic Christian crowd that they actually retired demon cards altogether, just to shut them up I guess. For years, creatures that were obviously demons and devils of some kind were given other types, like spirits or horrors or beasts, until demons crept back into the setting sometime in the 2000's, I think, and now we can have cards like the VILE MUTILATOR, a giant bat-winged skeleton goat man with fingers like spiderlegs, tatters of rotten skin dangling off its bones, and a six-eyed ram skull head, shown with a sacrificial glowing golden lamb in its clutches. SICK.

Viley is really into those sacrifices, too. To play the card at all you have to sacrifice a creature or an enchantment, and then your opponents all have to sacrifice a creature and an enchantment, if at all possible. The card also specifies that the opponent sacrifices can't be tokens; if you don't know the game too well, tokens are "spawns," little creatures generated by cards rather than cards themselves. They're easy to produce by various means, so they're fairly expendable. The language of Vile Mutilator means that you're allowed to use one of these cannon fodder to feed your new friend here, but the opponent has to scrap actual cards, on top of making up to twice the sacrifices you did.

This is an especially cool card for games with more than two players. Making a whole table of opponents give things up for your one hungry skeleton devil has to be pretty satisfying.

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