Capital Punishment

Most Council's dilemma cards split a payout among the table so that every voter shapes a single shared pool of consequence. This one inverts the math: the votes don't carve up one effect, they stack disruption onto your opponents directly, with each death vote pulling a sacrifice and each taxes vote pulling a discard from every opponent. Because you vote first and every ballot lands on the other side of the table, the political theater the mechanic was built for never really materializes the way it does on a card where your own vote can backfire. Opponents vote too, but their choices only feed the same grinder, since each vote (whoever casts it) resolves against each opponent. At a crowded table this becomes genuine volume, a wide attrition sweep that grows with every extra player forced to ante up. Pulled into a duel it shrinks dramatically: two votes total, two effects, the ceiling of a single Mind Rot or a pair of edicts rather than the multiplied haul a full pod produces. The trade it offers is precision for reach: opponents pick which creature dies and which card goes, so none of the surgical targeting that makes black's spot disruption sharp survives, but you hit every opponent at once. The flavor closes the loop better than the rate does: death and taxes, the two certainties, both arriving on the same ballot.