Mystic Barrier

Multiplayer politics rarely come with a hard rule attached: most cards that try to steer the table do it through incentives, threats, or the social contract. This one legislates. By forcing every player to attack only the nearest opponent in a chosen direction, it converts the open free-for-all of a multiplayer game into a fixed-rotation duel. The design works only because seating is a real, physical axis at a multiplayer table: "nearest opponent left or right" is meaningless in a two-player game and becomes the whole point once four players are arranged in a ring. That makes it a deliberately multiplayer-bound piece of architecture, an enchantment whose value is entirely a function of how many other people are in the game and where they sit. The control it grants is real but soft: it cannot stop a player from being attacked, only dictate who does the attacking, so its job is to point the swords elsewhere or to wall a defensive deck into a corner nobody can profitably swing into. Its flexibility lives in the re-choice at the beginning of its controller's upkeep, which lets that one player reorient the table's aggression as threats shift around the ring; between those windows the direction is locked, so the controller is not steering combat freely but resetting it once per lap. Everyone else lives inside a rule they did not choose and cannot revise until the enchantment leaves.