Norn's Decree

Poison has always belonged to the aggressor. Infect, toxic, proliferate: the mechanic is built to be dealt out, and the loss condition it threatens is one you inflict on someone else. This inverts the vector. Here poison is something opponents earn by hitting you, a counter that accrues on the attacker rather than the defender, turning the act of dealing combat damage into a wound they cannot undo. That flip rewrites the political math of a table: swinging at the player who controls this carries a hidden cost, because the poison counter never resets and never subtracts, so every connected hit is permanent progress toward a ten-counter concession the aggressors are building against themselves. The design leans on that accumulation rather than any burst; it converts a defensive posture into a slow clock, and it favors the player content to absorb damage and let the pattern compound instead of blocking or racing. The second clause is where the design shows real teeth as a table-politics tool: it does not draw for the controller. It hands cards to whoever attacks a poisoned player, meaning once opponents have poison counters on them, attacking each other suddenly refills their hands. That turns the enchantment into an incentive structure aimed outward, nudging poisoned opponents to point their creatures at one another and rewarding the aggression while its controller sits behind the whole arrangement, untouched and unpunished for engineering it.