Order of Succession

The rotational steal is a multiplayer-only conceit, and this one runs the chain in a single chosen direction. You pick left or right, then each player in turn grabs a creature from the next seat over, gaining control of it. The wording does the political work: you choose the direction the theft travels and you steal first, but you do not get to dictate what anyone else takes, only your own pick and the geometry of the exchange. That is the constraint paying for the four-mana rate. Two details keep it honest at the table. A player who controls no creatures hands nothing forward, so the seat behind an empty board comes up dry, and the card never promises a tidy round-robin where everyone ends up with something. And in a two-player game the chain wraps after one step, collapsing into a mutual swap closer to Switcheroo than to a clean theft: both players take from the other, and only an empty board on the controller's side turns it into the one-way grab it superficially resembles. What lingers is the negotiation it invites before it ever resolves. The direction you announce reshapes three board states at once, so the threat of casting it is often worth more than the cast, and the table will haggle over who sits where in the chain long before the spell hits the stack.