Deadly Designs

A removal spell the whole table can advance. The payoff at the bottom is genuine (up to two creatures destroyed for good), but it never fires on your timeline alone: any player may pay two mana to add a plot counter, and the fifth counter is what triggers the sacrifice. That open-activation clause is the entire design. It converts a private removal spell into a shared resource anyone can push forward, and it bargains in politics rather than mana. You can sandbag the counters and feed all ten mana yourself over several turns, or you can convince an opponent who also wants those creatures gone to spend the last activation for you. The wrinkle is that none of that hands over the targets. You control the enchantment, so the triggered ability is yours, and you choose what dies regardless of who pushed the counter to five. That asymmetry is the lever: an opponent can help you finish it faster, but they cannot steer the destruction, which means the player nearest to five negotiates from strength. The result behaves less like a spell than a negotiation token sitting in the open, its threat value tied to who controls the enchantment rather than who paid for it. It is one of the rare designs that hands an ability to the table at large and lets the social layer decide when it goes off.