Choice of Damnations

The cruelty here is procedural: you hand your opponent the knife and let them decide where it cuts. They choose a number; then you choose which of two punishments that number triggers. A small number is a trap that wants you to take the sacrifice mode, because losing all but two permanents is catastrophic while the matching two life is nothing. A large number flips it: the sacrifice barely registers, but the life-loss option turns potentially lethal. The opponent's whole job is to find the number where both outcomes hurt equally, and the spell's job is to make sure that equilibrium is still ruinous. This is forced-decision design in the punisher tradition, where the caster sets the terms and the opponent has to allocate the pain against themselves. But the usual punisher (Browbeat, Skullscorch, the Vexing Devil shape) offers a clean either/or between two resources the opponent can read in advance; this one makes them set the price first, then watch you decide whether it gets paid in blood or in board. The reason it never quite found a home is that six mana to make an opponent name their own worst case is slow, and a careful opponent will usually pick the number that leaves them alive with a few permanents and a road back. It survives as a Rube Goldberg machine for misery rather than a reliable answer: a sorcery built entirely around the psychology of a single number, whose punchline is that no number is safe to say.