Reason #8,894: The Rakdos cult is full of evil, evil people.

I suppose one could debate what a rusalka is, and that could change how one interprets this situation. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe they’re closer to the malevolent, nature spirits of Slavic folklore. Looking at the flavor text on the rest of the cards in the rusalka cycle from the Guildpack expansion, it seems to me like MTG rusalka are the ghosts of people, ones who all seem to have met tragic ends. Perhaps that’s why they stuck around.

So.

Is anyone else actually reading this stuff? These cultists just hung a child for fun, they did it in public, and they got away with it. This is the kind of stuff that I don’t like about the world building in MTG. Sometimes this horrible stuff just feels horrible for the sake of being horrible. When you put stuff like this up beside all the other absurdly, near-comically awful things in the MTG Multiverse and the dumpster-fire mishmash that is MTG’s cosmology and metaphysics, this comes off as hollow and nihilistic.

This kind of awful isn’t just a cold, uncaring universe at work. This is the darkness hiding in the heart of man.

Plenty of stuff makes me just shake my head; as often as not, the Rakdos cult comes off as ridiculously self-destructive and stupid. Nobody can effectively use as many knives as they try to. But this…murdering kids for sport?

Yeah. I’m not entertained.