Kansas Prison Magic Scene To Receive Influx of Mythic Grinders
As of last Thursday, February 26th, the Kansas state legislature has made a move expected to, among other things, place a very significant amount of skilled Magic: The Gathering players in Kansas county jails for at least six months, if not longer, depending on how effectively they are able to use the cycle of criminal recidivism against those skilled players.
“We just really wanted to shake up the meta, you know?” says an anonymous legislator who voted ‘yes’ on the bill, even after the governor’s veto. “Those of us at the Kansas state house just love Magic, and because we, like all lawmakers, have absolutely no interest or incentive to work for the benefits of our constituents, we’ve got a lot of free time. We decided to use that to, for some reason, get really invested in the Magic meta in our county jails!”
After a significant amount of time spent kicking around paper footballs and Tweeting–sorry, making posts on X.com–on the taxpayer’s dollar, the members of the legislature thought that they could, as a laugh, put a bunch of high-level Magic players into jail just to really push the so-called “jailhouse meta” to its limits.
“We thought it would be funny,” says another anonymous lawmaker, who also voted ‘yes,’ and certainly does not belong to a publicly-available list of people with names and phone numbers which could be called relentlessly by people who may, for whatever reason, be upset with them. “I mean, we get SO bored trying to pretend we care about any of you worms and your silly little worm lives. Why not imprison a bunch of trans peopl–I MEAN, skilled Magic players–just to see how it affects the county jail’s upcoming draft?”
The move is, however, somewhat controversial among the populations who’re directly affected. “Are you fucking kidding me right now?” asks a local Mythic grinder, who chose to remain anonymous. “Are you for fucking real? You think I’m thinking about whether I’m gonna be able to play Magic in fucking JAIL while I’m dealing with this shit? They didn’t give us a single day as a grace period. It is illegal for me to drive right now, and I have to drive to work in order to make money and fucking live. This is an absurdly blatant attempt to criminalize my very existence, how in the world could you be thinking about Magic: The Gathering when these fucking ghouls make me want to–”
The interviewee’s comments have been truncated for legal reasons.
Current occupants of the county jail also weighed in.
“I’m literally incarcerated for a nonviolent crime that had no victims, kept here only for the benefit of private, for-profit prisons,” says one anonymous inmate. “You think they let us play Magic? They spend like two dollars on our meals for a whole day. They’re literally financially incentivized to treat us as terribly as possible. Even proxying would be too expensive just in terms of printer ink, let alone actually buying any cards from that exorbitantly overpriced game. Not that that matters at all. Why the hell are you even asking me about this?”
No other inmates were available for comment, and this reporter was soon escorted out of the jail for…
… okay, y’know what? Forget it. Sorry, Zoe, I tried.
This shit is monstrous and ghoulish and beyond the fucking pale. I’m shocked I could even keep the ‘bit’ up for that long. Transgender people are being legislated out of existence before your very eyes because the people who run this country get off on doing it and they don’t think you will stop them. Nobody benefits from this. Nobody is protected, nobody is made safe. They are killing us because they feel like it.
I am just one woman. I am a single girl who, probably naïvely, thinks she can make a difference. I do what I can–I donate to my trans friends in need, I make my parents call their reps while I call my own, I try to be visible and extremely competent in my workplace, I become a big sister for trans kids rejected by their families, but it’s not enough. I’m just one girl. We’re ALL just one person. I’m not funded by anybody. I don’t have an ‘agenda’ besides trying to survive. I don’t wanna ‘trans’ your kid or do any weird sex stuff to anybody or anything else that those fucking monsters claim I want to do.
I want to get up, go to work, hang out with my friends, and play a silly little card game to take my mind off of this constant, existential nightmare we live in like anybody else. But the most powerful and wretched people in this country want me dead so fucking badly because they are terrified that me living my life means that they might have to acknowledge that I’m exactly as entitled to personhood as they are.
We’re maybe one percent of the country. We’re all tired and underprivileged and completely fucking terrified. We will all die if they can kill us. There’s not enough of us, not to stop the monsters who’re as blatant as these people very clearly are. We all make jokes about being good at Magic or whatever but even ignoring the way we get beaten down and hated if we’re ever exceptional at anything: If you want there to be ‘Mythic grinders’ in your LGS, if you want us to make content or pioneer metas or show up at tournaments, or even if you just think we deserve to be alive, then fucking help us. Stand with us. We might be one of the first dominoes, but I promise you, we will not be the last.
I will leave you with a single piece of Magic flavor text that has always spoken to me, printed on Lena, Selfless Champion–a card so bad it’s almost unplayable, even in EDH:
“Those who do evil and those who do nothing are equally worthy of contempt.”
My actual first name is Lena. I don’t want to be selfless, I don’t want to be a champion. I just want to live.
