Fun little minigame. It might read simpler if it wasn't phrased in terms of copying spells. I don't know.

Me neither, but I think the spell copying uses less words. So this is kind of a matter of "Which confuses you more: Strange Mechanical Interactions, or, Words."

Do you think this would be less confusing?

Sacrifice a Permanent: Gain control of ~. Any player may play this ability, but only if ~ is on the stack.

Ah, like Lightning Storm. Perhaps.

I was envisaging:

> Each player may sacrifice a permanent. Repeat this process until nobody does. Then the last player to sacrifice a permanent draws 3 cards, and all of that player's opponents lose life equal to the number of permanents sacrificed this turn.

(This has a bug in the case where nobody does.) But I think I probably do prefer jmgariepy's version:

> Draw 3 cards. All your opponents lose life equal to the number of permanents sacrificed this turn.
> Sacrifice a permanent: Gain control of ~. Any player may play this ability, but only if ~ is on the stack.

Converting over to the last version. I like the copying itself version just because of how odd that is, but the easy to understand version will make more players happy.