Based on your description, you're talking about Reaction and not Mirror. Reaction says all energy and mental strikes also deal their damage back to the striker instantly. If you were using Animate, there's only 2 weapons that deal energy damage, Flamethrower and Grenades. If you used Mind Control instead, that would let you use many other powers that could do Mental or Energy damage,

The card you used to control the opponent character's action matters greatly.

Animate means the character doing the controlling is the striker. Mind Control means that the character being controlled is the striker.

If you used Animate, then it means you HAD to be using Grenades OR Flamethrower, which makes the effect of Reaction or Mirror completely counter-intuitive. Basically, using Animate means you are the striker, and Reaction affects the striker instantly, so your character with Animate suffers the damage of the flamethrower or the grenades even though your character is completely out of range or not in line of sight. That you had a shield on the character with Animate wouldn't matter, because the effect on the striker is NOT a strike, but rather the RESULT of the strike. So if the flamethrower did 3 energy damage to the opponent with Reaction, then your character would suffer 3 energy damage, but would NOT be the target of a strike. The same is true of Mirror.

However, if you were using Mind Control, then the opponent's character is the striker and suffers the effects as ruled by Mirror/Reaction, the same as above.

This is my interpretation of the rules.

--Al

Jules wrote:

Hey all,
  I played last week and we got a great question (it happens almost every game).
  I used Animate to make my opponent shoot his team mate - yay.
  He used 'reflectdamage' (I can recall the name of the card at the moment), however the gist was to have the damage also apply to the players doing the strike - ie: me.
  I wanted it to apply to his player not mine but the card was pretty clear about it being the striker so I took it.
  However, I had a shield up facing the right direction if the damage was coming back to the player who was being animated.  Unfortunately my player was on a diagonal - so I had to suck it.

  How should this have played out?

Jules.

On Tue, Nov 11, 2008 at 2:50 AM, David Bickham <dbickham@...> wrote:

Thanks for the quick responses and helpful info! I'll be sure to post
more questions here as they come up.
--David