Champions of Minas Tirith
Most monarch enablers give the crown away and dare opponents to take it back through combat: the mechanic was built around the tension of holding a card-draw engine while a table swings at you. This one flips the incentive. Handing you the monarch on arrival is standard, but the combat trigger turns the crown into a tax rather than a target. Each opponent who wants to attack you must pay generic mana equal to their hand size, and a full grip makes that toll punishing. It reads as a soft Propaganda scaled to the exact resource opponents least want to convert: their held cards. It punishes the archetypes that most want to punish you back, since the wide, card-rich board that would normally reclaim the monarch through damage is precisely the board paying the steepest price to connect. The 4/6 body is sized to survive combat rather than dominate it, keeping the monarch draws flowing without asking the card to carry a game on stats. And because the toll applies only to attacks against you, it protects the crown without freezing the wider fight: opponents can still turn their aggression on one another while you either bank an extra card each turn or watch them bleed mana to reach you.


