Hostile Negotiations
Fact or Fiction handed the pile-splitting decision to your opponent and charged you nothing; this is the black conversion of that idea, and it moves nearly every knob to make the tension harder. You do not choose the piles' contents but you do choose which pile gets revealed, so the ritual is a bluffing exercise: turn up the pile you can bear to lose and hope the opponent hands you back the hidden one, or reveal the pile you want and dare them to give you the mystery instead. Where the original was a card-neutral instant, this one converts life into information, taxing three life for the privilege of taking three cards from a six-deep dig. That life clause is not incidental; it is the resource this card actually spends, turning what looks like pure card advantage into an aggressive trade that a black midrange or aristocrats deck can afford and a control shell has to weigh. The face-up-then-opponent-chooses sequence is the real machinery: it lets you signal, misdirect, and manipulate which three of six cards you keep, but it never lets you simply take the best pile. The opponent always gets the last word on the split, which is the constraint that keeps a six-card instant-speed dig from being oppressive.
