Plague of Vermin

A symmetrical life auction with no upper bound, and that openness is the whole problem the card poses. Everyone gets to pay, but the turn order is the lever: you act first, so you commit a number, and every opponent then chooses independently how much life to spend of their own. The math is brutal in its simplicity. One life buys one Rat, so a player at twenty can swing a board of twenty 1/1s into existence in a single resolution, and the only ceiling is how much life anyone is willing to spend. Because the process repeats until no one pays, it becomes a bidding war where stopping early cedes the board and overcommitting cedes the life total. The symmetry is an illusion the moment one player has a way to capitalize: a sacrifice payoff that turns the army back into damage, or a drain engine that recoups the life everyone just liquidated. That player isn't competing in the auction; they've rigged it. The blackness is no accident either. This is a spell that treats life as a resource to be liquidated rather than protected, the same wager that underwrites the color's entire approach to power. As a standalone effect it is a coin flip on who profits, but as part of a build that already wants a flood of disposable bodies and already plays its life total loose, it is a payoff engine wearing the costume of a fair deal.