I looked up the archetypical Comedy and Tragedy masks as the basis for that Jester mask, and my goodness do I find them creepy. "Comedy" looks downright sinister on a lot of the detailed masks I saw.

We're in the middle of a collectable card game storyline, and there might be those among you who are aware that there is a Magic: The Gathering card called "Jester's Mask".

That was not the inspiration for anything happening here, and it was a massive coincidence. It did, however, tempt me to phrase it as "a jester's mask" instead of "a jester mask".

Ultimately, I didn't feel an obscure reference was worth obscuring the point of what Jay was saying. "Jester's" sounds like it's a mask belonging to a jester, whereas the point here is that it's a mask OF a jester.

Anyway, what did that old Magic card do, anyway? I'm genuinely looking it up while writing this.

Five Mana, enters tapped (likely can't be used until your next turn), pay one and tap (turn sideways), immediately sacrifice it, AND... Your opponent puts their hand on top of their deck, then you choose that many cards from their deck to be their new hand, then shuffle.

So you give them a new hand of equal size and get a chance to look through their deck, basically. That's the sort of card that probably sounded amazing to younger me while actually being a slow buildup for relatively little payoff.

Younger me also would probably have thought of that as "wacky fun!", but ye gods, imagine how long it might take with physical cards to look through a deck you don't own, choose possibly several cards, and then properly shuffle that deck (likely made more awkward via card sleeves).

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- EGSNP is on a "Dan's shoulder is rebelling" break, but will return Thursday