Welcome back to Name That Card! This week's card has a casting cost. But the card type is still up in the air. Feel free to make this an enchantment, a colored artifact, or even a 0/2 creature if you prefer.

Looked better with a stronger line break. Not a true edit.

Socialist Charter?

Thanks for doing these every week, JM!

The first thing, flavor-wise to me feels like a mutually beneficial thing, but not necessarily for mutually beneficial reasons...

I don't play magic much anymore, so IIRC is all about Order, since both white and blue enjoy that... So that's going to be the background of the card.

Each player can't cast more than one spell this turn? So limitations... the flavor of that? Dunno... It's not desirable so either it's done for good or bad reasons, for those who are effected (ignoring the player, since they choose to have the effect via playing the card, barring weird situations where they get controlled by someone else)

So... Order is the main theme and the two abilities are Mutual Benefit and Limitation.

I like the idea of a charter of some kind, and at this cost I really am feeling an Enchantment. So It's going to be some sort of law pact...

Azorius ___ ? Maybe, but I could possibly do better. If I can limit it to one word for all those three things, than azorius will be the prefix, otherwise I'll probably need two words (hopefully not more, since that's kind of a failure in my eyes, not succinct)

Okay. So maybe the two words can be the two abilities. Ordered Mutual Benefit and Ordered Limitations...

Mutual Benefit... Some kind of agreement and limitations.. i could probably find a cool word for that? Abjuration, silence, etc (not great examples but ill thesaurus)

So a synonym for limits and a synonym for agreement.

First result alphabetically is Accord.. I really like that

compromise might be more fitting, though since the second ability is generally undesirable although it is balanced by the first, which is... Very compromise

In fact i'll thesaurize compromise

So Accord could still work, but it needs a first word i feel

Azorius Compromise? Hm... not awful.

now for the second word from before... Constraint is cool...

Constraining Compromise or Azorius Accommodation. If i can only do one, I'll go with the former of the two.

Edit: Just want to say there were lots of good options I found so if I missed one you liked, my apologies their all very tasty

Unending ArbitrationType: Enchantment

I don't know how to include breaks

Line breaks?
You mean like this?

Since these text boxes accept html notation, you can type <br>
whenever you want to make a line break. Alex would tell you that you should close that line break at the end of the line with this: </br> to prevent very, very rare formatting chaos from happening. But if you don't understand how html works, <br> by its lonesome should do.

...huh; an Eidolon of Rhetoric (or Rule of Law) has decided to haunt a Howling Mine (or Walking Archive).

Haunt.. that's an interesting idea. This is obviously a bonkers-level political card. Making it something that sits on a creature and then later makes someone else a target... could be fun. (Bonkers presumably having creature-type spotty cat?)

But while making this a haunt effect would be fun - it changes the card quite a lot. So sadly it's a no-go.

Maybe we can capture a bit of it in the flavour though - this is after all both a good thing and a bad thing in a single card. (Though sadly anyone actually making use of it will find ways to make it pure-downside for everyone else.)

At this cost putting it on a creature would be a small creature, as a way of making it vulnerable. Both white and blue can do the second part of the effect; but it must be coming from the white side, since unconditional card draw is much more a blue thing.
I think it would also be fun to make this an aura. Gets most of the political messery I was wanting. So. Enchant Player is cruel, but kinda too confusing to actually implement.

So yeah, I'll be boring - it's artifact or enchantment. And the only name I can come up with is from mashing the sources.

So Name... Law Archive Which makes it an Artifact.

(You can also get a newline by putting two spaces at the end of the previous line. Why? Because markdown is DUMB.)

Oh?
I did not know that.

Arbiter of Fairness

I'm giving it to Sorrow this week. These were all good names. None of them were a quite perfect fit. But the more I ruminated on Unending Arbitration, the more I started to like how much of a mouthful it was. The sound of the words matched the feel of the card, if that makes any sense.

Though props to Link for figuring that the card smacked of socialism. I find it interesting how ideas like socialism, which could in theory pop up at any civilization's tech level, don't 'belong' in fantasy because it's a nineteenth century economic invention. Yet, nobody seems to have a problem with the idea of banks existing in their role-playing games. Strange how that works.

Anyhow, (((Name That Card #012))) in a day or two. See you then!

I guess the thing is, if 90% of people work in factories, people NEED to work together, because one person can't build 1% of a factory by themselves. So the people who build the factories have all the leverage, whether that's rich people or the government, and that's the question you have to answer.

But if 90% of people are farmers and they think the feudal overlords have too much influence, they don't necessarily need to replace them with anything, they can just have less of them.

Oh, wow. This wasn't a conversation I was expecting to have today. :)

This is an interesting argument, Jack. Let me flip it on its head. If 99% of the people worshiped in a cathedral, they would NEED to work together, because one person can't build 1% of a cathedral. And feudal peasants often worked on cathedrals for generations. Clearly, they were able to work equally when given the proper motivation (in this case, religious fervor. Or possibly long-term economic incentive from pilgrims. But probably religious fervor.) I don't think socialism only comes about due to industrialization. I think the real problem was the lack of literacy and literature. It's possible that socialist ideas really don't spread until there's a certain readership threshold to pass the idea along. So I guess the question is "How well read are the citizens in your fantasy campaign?"

(As an aside, feudal lords protected farmers from other feudal lords. If you have less lords or knights, then the lord next door would just come smashing through the borders and the peasants might be in a worse place than when they started. But, yes, the Magna Carta is an excellent example of what happens when the peasants have a lot of power, feel particularly secure in their realm, and aren't willing to put up with their lord's (king's) shenanigans.)

Me: Communism? Jmg: Communism AND religion?

­:)

Yeah, I didn't EXPECT this to lead to this discussion, but there you go...

I see what you're saying, but I think it actually is different. Like, the more industrialisation, the more specialisation, the more you NEED centralisation. Yes, defence is the one thing that almost always has to be centralised in any society. But in an industrialised country, LOTS of things are like that, and in a feudal agricultural society less so.

I guess the first steps are mills, one mill for the village, where whoever owns that has leverage.

So, yes, everyone can work together to build a cathedral, but if they decide they're getting a raw deal, they can just stop and renegotiate. Your survival doesn't depend on keeping everyone working together.

And fwiw, I don't know this history well, but I think that when normal people get power generally doesn't have a big headline, it's just like 'post plague years, not so much is going on with named individuals because they don't have enough soldiers to be famous' while living workers have more flexibility. I think magna carta is a big victory for nobility over monarch (even though the concepts therein were arguably expanded to cover more people later).