Syphon Flesh
Edicts have always asked a quiet design question: what counts as fair compensation for forcing a sacrifice you do not get to aim? Most answers keep the price low and the upside flat. Diabolic Edict spends two mana and gives you nothing back; Geth's Verdict adds a point of drain. This one swings the trade the other way. Hitting every opponent at once is the dividend of a multiplayer table, but the real lever is that you keep a 2/2 Zombie for each creature that dies, so a four-handed table can hand you three bodies off a single resolution. That inverts the usual edict math, where the spell is pure removal and the caster ends a card down: here the board gets wider as it gets emptier. The catch built into every edict still applies, since defenders pick what to lose and almost always feed you their most expendable creature, but you no longer care about the quality of the kill when you are converting each one into a body that pressures them next turn. The friction is the rate, since five mana at sorcery speed is slow for an effect that lets each player choose what to lose, and against a single opponent it collapses into an overpriced one-for-one. The token clause leans on a structural quirk of the group sacrifice: the more players at the table, the better the conversion, which makes this a spell that rewards a crowded board and withers in a duel.
