ENTRY 24: THE MINDSKINNER!

We're in the final seven days already, so of course we're amping up to "bigger deal" monsters, and today we have a legendary Nightmare creature! One so powerful, it gets its own unique character name rather than a "fear of" title, though it does represent a particular fear, which we'll explain soon enough.

Mindskinner has a fun sort of edgy demon beast design; it bears a huge iron "halo" surrounding a black, armored head with a viciously fangly mouth and no eyes, its tapering body seems to be covered densely in thorns, and it has over a dozen big, spiny red-stained arms with huge bladelike claws. It's a look somewhat reminiscent of the larger Tyranids from Warhammer, and what I'd also lovingly call another very "Digimon" sort of design. Of course it also has a cloud of wispy human souls pouring out of (or into?) its yawning jaws, tying it in with the setting's lesser Nightmares, and I love just how delighted its expression looks.

Principal skinner is also mechanically kind of ridiculous! The Mindskinner costs only three blue mana, something easy to play even early in the game, but 10/1 means that, while it takes just one damage to kill Mindskinner, it should in theory be able to inflict ten damage at once. In a standard game, that's half of the opponent's starting life, and the Mindskinner can't be blocked, so that would allow this thingy to kill a player in just two turns.

BUT WAIT! That's not what happens at all!! Because as long as Mindskinner is in play, you can't damage the opponent anymore. Instead, any time one of your cards would have damaged another player, that player instead dumps that many cards from their library straight into their graveyard. Some decks might have safeguards against that of course, and some are even built entirely around playing from the graveyard or recycling it back into the graveyard, but it's obviously a whole lot more common for cards to protect against actual damage or add to a player's life total, so the majority of survival strategies are rendered irrelevant. This all represents the fact that it attacks your mind directly by slicing away your memories, until there's nothing left!

But what is The Mindskinner the "fear" of?

We saw one of the Razorkin when we reviewed the Gremlins, but didn't get too deep into what exactly they are; former human survivors twisted by the house into insatiable sadomasochists who subject their victims to elaborate mazes and traps. The Mindskinner, it turns out, is a manifestation of the fear of Razorkin, making it the first Nightmare born uniquely from inhabitants of the house itself rather than a more common fundamental anxiety. I guess that's why it's such a weird and powerful one! This also makes perfect sense of its design, really resembling the esthetics and motives of these heavy metal BDSM slasher villains distilled into an inhuman monster!

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