Protection Racket
Most black draw engines charge the controller: the Phyrexian Arena lineage, the Necropotence school, all of them convert your own life total into cards. This one flips the direction and hands the decision to the table. On your upkeep, in turn order, each opponent looks at the top card of your library and chooses between two outcomes, both of them yours to profit from. If they pay life equal to that card's mana value, it gets exiled; if they refuse, it goes into your hand. The tension lives entirely in the mana value you happen to reveal. A cheap flip is nearly free to exile, so opponents pay a point or two and deny you the card without much thought. An expensive flip demands a real chunk of life, which is exactly the moment an opponent would rather let you have it than bleed for it. So the card you keep tends to be the fat one, and the card you lose tends to be the land or one-drop you'd miss least. The controller wins on both axes: dear cards become a group-wide life tax you don't have to enforce, and cheap cards get filtered out of the way. It reads like a political trinket and behaves like one, negotiating its price opponent by opponent, but the underlying math is a genuine attrition engine that scales upward with the number of opponents rather than diluting against them.
