Paliano, the High City

The text that matters happens before a single card is cast: the draft instruction that makes this one of the rare designs built to be played during the draft rather than after it. Revealing it as you pick locks in a three-color identity that you and your two neighbors negotiate on the spot, with the player to your right choosing one color, you choosing another, and the player to your left choosing the third. That is the design idea at the heart of it: most cards interact with opponents through the board, but this one reaches across the table during the act of drafting, turning a private selection into a public commitment and pulling the players on either side of you into a choice that constrains your deck before the match begins. Two of your three colors are chosen by people who are not on your side. The mana ability is the downstream consequence of that negotiation: it fixes for whichever three colors were agreed upon when the card was drafted, a payoff that only makes sense in the context of the bargain that produced it. The fixing is real and usable in the game, but it is a receipt for an agreement made three players deep, not the reason the card exists.