Fraying Line

A group-slaughter pact dressed up as a ticking clock, with the payments handed to the table instead of the caster. The bones are cumulative-upkeep flavor, but the tax lands on the active player at each upkeep: pay two and mark one of your creatures with a rope counter, or let the artifact exile itself and take every unroped creature with it. The political geometry is sharp because the counters accumulate. A rope counter holds until the sweep fires; once a creature has one, it stays safe until the exile trigger finally resolves, so each upkeep you spend two mana buys permanent protection for exactly one more body. That turns board development into a slow arms race: a wide player has more creatures to shield and only ever adds one per cycle, so if the payments ever stop, the reckoning hits them hardest. The result is a negotiable, symmetric board sweep that arrives on a timer and gives everyone repeated chances to postpone it, one creature and two mana at a time. The wrinkle is that no single player unilaterally controls whether it goes off; each player decides for themselves whether to keep feeding the rope, which turns the exile clause into a shared brinkmanship problem rather than a threat one player aims at the others. Its real text is the negotiation it forces, and the way the counters pile up until whoever has roped their board is tempted to let the clock run out.