Liege of the Hollows

A symmetrical death trigger that turns into an auction with a fixed seating order. The 3/4 body is fine enough for its cost, but the design lives entirely in the dying clause: when it goes, every player gets to pay mana to make their own Squirrels. The crucial wrinkle is that this is not a blind, simultaneous bid. Like every effect where all players pay during resolution, it follows turn order, so the active player commits first with no information, and each player after gets to see what has already been spent before deciding. The last player in the sequence pays with perfect knowledge of the table. That asymmetry is what makes the trigger a politics engine first and a token generator second. You are not just deciding how many Squirrels you want; if you are early in the order you are guessing how badly the players downstream want to outproduce you, and if you are late you are pricing your army against a count you can already read. The symmetry of the offer keeps the bidding honest: there is no way to seed yourself a board without handing the table the same option, so the card rewards whoever can engineer a window where their own mana matters more than anyone else's, often by killing it after a sweeper has flattened the count. The whole structure builds around a group auction rather than a one-on-one value calculation, which is why it has aged into a multiplayer fixture long after its original setting stopped mattering.