Avarice Totem

Donation effects usually hand your opponent something they will struggle to use; this one hands them an artifact that lets them take it right back, and that loop is the entire strategic axis. The mechanism is a control-exchange engine: pay five to swap the totem itself for any nonland permanent an opponent controls, and the totem becomes the toll they must pay to swap back. The intended play pattern is rented theft: trade the totem for a fattie or a problematic permanent, and your opponent has to spend their own five mana to undo the exchange, which they often cannot afford every turn. The exchange is strictly between the totem and a single target, so this is no all-purpose laundering tool; it grabs one thing and leaves the totem in the loser's hands as collateral. The friction is built-in symmetry: whoever controls the totem can fire it, so a stolen permanent is never permanently stolen, only rented at five mana per turn against an opponent willing to match the price. That symmetry is exactly why it never anchored a competitive deck and instead became a curiosity for politics-driven multiplayer tables, where the ongoing negotiation over who eats the totem matters more than tempo. It comes from an early-era streak of control-swap artifacts that treated control of a permanent as a tradeable resource rather than a settled state, even as ownership stayed fixed beneath it.