Is Loot Making Our Prisons Less Safe? 
The Oxidation of the Mirrodin Small Town
The streets of Bismont, Tinnessee are quiet these days, but it wasn’t always like that. This small town, nestled in the shadow of the great furnace, was once a thriving mining community. Like many towns in the once thriving region of the plane called the rust clamp, Bismont sits on a large deposit of artifact, and the town’s whole economy revolved around mining it.
“It used to be that everyone who needed a job could get one in the mines” said Slobill, a 75-year-old retired krark-clan grunt. I met Slobill at a diner on main street, one of the few businesses still open. He lost a hand to a shrapnel blast, and a son to a runaway megatog. Nevertheless, he wishes the mine was still open. “We used to make stuff in this country. Everything used to be powered by artifact lands. The ironworks, the frogmite factories, heck I even knew a guy in Mephidross who just wanted people to destroy artifact lands in front of him. But now, with all this government regulation, no one uses artifact lands anymore.”
Artifact lands, once the premier energy source of the multiverse, fell out of favor when the DCI discovered the harmful effect that pollution from sacrificing these lands had on the metagame. As the fifth sun rose for the first time, a flurry of new regulations and treaties severely limited the use of artifact lands across the multiverse, forcing the mine here to shut down.
Many here in Bismont are hopeful that the election of a new Praetor, Elesh Norn, will usher in an age of deregulation that will lead to massive demand for artifact lands. “I’m sure that any day now, there will be some sort of Battle for New Phyrexia, and then everyone will be clamoring for the mines to reopen to power their Inkbound Ravagers and Greater Frogmites” Slobill’s wife Korva, Vulshok Homemaker, tells me. But Slobill isn’t so sure. “Sure, everyone used to want artifacts to power their furnace dragons and broodstars, but can we really compete with these new alternate energy sources like natural gas or cats. I just don’t know.”
