Vona's Hunger

Edict effects hand the choice to the opponent: they feed you the token, the chump, the creature they had already written off, and a competent player minimizes the loss. This one never revokes that choice, but it rewrites the arithmetic of it. Without the city's blessing it works as a plain Diabolic Edict variant at instant speed, forcing a hexproof threat off the board or dragging a lone attacker out of combat, the familiar work of the one-shot sacrifice that a shielded creature cannot dodge. Ascend, checked as the spell resolves rather than as a later trigger, scales the volume when your permanent count crosses into double digits: instead of one creature apiece, each opponent gives up half of theirs (still their choice, still the least valuable half), rounded up, so five becomes three and three becomes two. The lever is what feeds the condition. Lands and other noncreature permanents fill the quota, which means the city's blessing can flip on while you are behind on the creature board, not just when you are ahead of it. That is what keeps the upgrade from being pure win-more: a stalled or outnumbered player who has simply developed enough total permanents can turn a single edict into a mass sacrifice and claw back a board they were losing. The design lives in that gap between the threshold and the pressure it answers: overwhelming when the board is wide, an ordinary edict when it is not, and a genuine reset when the count arrives at the moment you need it most.