Atris, Oracle of Half-Truths
The prisoner's dilemma rendered as a card. Fact or Fiction gave the opponent the fork and made it symmetric: they split your top cards, you choose which half to keep. Atris keeps the split but flips the payoff structure, and the flip is the whole trick. Your opponent still separates the top three, but now they must hide their intentions, sorting into a face-down pile and a face-up pile before you decide anything. The face-up cards are known quantities; the face-down cards are a bluff wearing a poker face. Whichever pile you take goes to hand, the other to the graveyard, so the opponent is trying to bait you: stack the visible pile with dead cards to lure you toward a face-down trap, or hide your best card and dare you to gamble. Every configuration is a lie of a different shape, which is what earns the name. The 3/2 with menace is deliberately unremarkable: this is a value engine stapled to a body that would rather not block, and the card wants to trade its enters-the-battlefield fork more than once, so recursion and flicker turn a one-shot mind game into a repeatable one. The design lives entirely in the human interaction it creates, a small psychological duel that resolves differently against every opponent and rewards reading the person across the table as much as the pile in front of you.
