Círdan the Shipwright

Voting mechanics in multiplayer politics usually push in one direction: the group ganging up on a threat, or the table colluding to deny value. Secret council inverts the incentive by making votes a resource that both feeds and starves. Vote for a player and you hand them cards; refuse to vote for someone and you hand them a free permanent from their hand. There is no way to vote that punishes cleanly, because both outcomes are gifts. That tension is the whole engine. A player receiving no votes can drop a land, a mana rock, or a bomb straight to the battlefield, which means the table is negotiating in real time over who gets card advantage and who gets a tempo swing, with the answers hidden until reveal. The vigilance and the enter-or-attack trigger keep the loop running every combat without asking Círdan to stay home, so the political calculation resets each turn. What makes the design sit comfortably in Simic is that both halves of the payout reward the same thing green and blue already want, cards and permanents on the battlefield, so no vote is genuinely bad for the owner even when the table tries to be clever. The result is a group-hug card that never quite hugs: everyone comes out ahead, but the shipwright's controller has structured the whole exchange, and structure is its own advantage.