ENTRY 16: CACKLING SLASHER
This is the last "human" we're going to look at, and like the two we've already seen, they're using the term loosely. This goof looks less human than the average Zombie card even does, with a leathery skull-like mask - or is that actually the face? - showing off an abnormally large mouth with long, thin teeth. The skin around their beady eyes looks raw and red, the nose is sliced off, and most disturbingly, their forearms taper into thin, bloodstained spikes, as if their hands were sliced off and the bones wittled down into skewers. These are also barbed, almost like insect limbs, and appear to be tight-fitting "gloves" almost up the figure's shoulders. Their legs, too, are encased in spiny, bladed metal boots that seem to keep tapering off where feet would be, and their body is wrapped in countless leather belts. At 3/3, they're already pretty tough, not to mention they have "Deathtouch" to instakill any creature of any size they so much as scratch, but they also enter play as a 4/4 if something else already died the same turn, as if invigorated by the sight and smell of freshly spilled blood.
Of all the humans adapted to the manor, this is the most modified by far, and were they modified by someone else, or slowly do this to themselves? And sure, forces of magic, alchemy, demonic possession or other supernatural alteration could have been involved, but in most other sets, I feel like that would have qualified the card as something other than just a human. At least some kind of hybrid, like a human mutant, a human horror or a human nightmare. Leaving this card totally human says something appropriately darker about Duskmourn's world; a human becoming a monster is expected, but a human becoming a human indistinguishable from a monster is much nastier in a very fun way.
This card also emphasizes why I think they managed to make Duskmourn a darker, scarier and more brutal setting than even Phyrexia, and if you're an outsider to Magic's terminology and multiverse, Phyrexia is a plane of disease-spewing bioweaponry that most cultures mistake for their respective versions of hell, perfectly summarized by the fact that in Phyrexia, the following things are considered "birds:"
Now obviously Phyrexia is "scary," and it also RULES, and in fact I was long planning to give "Phyrexian Things" a review series just like this one until Duskmourn was announced, and I possibly still should. But there's a big, big difference in tone and impact between a malevolent netherworld of surreal deathbeast aberrations and a malevolent netherworld that distorts familiar man-made architecture into something that can reduce someone like you to "Cackling Slasher" without any infernal necromantic genetic experimentation.
