Mamluk playing-card suits were renamed twice in succession along their transmission route, each time for local resemblance: Chinese coins misread as polo-sticks, then polo-sticks misread as batons

The suit now called "batons" or "clubs" in European (and still, today, Italian/Spanish) card decks carries a two-hop resemblance-driven renaming on its route. Mamluk Egypt/Levant playing cards (13th–15th c.) had four suits — coins, cups, swords, and polo-sticks, the last reflecting the game's popularity among the Mamluk elite; this suit structure is independently confirmed by playing-card historian Simon Wintle's own reference site, entity-simon-wintle. The polo-stick suit is itself believed to be a resemblance-driven reinterpretation of an earlier Chinese card suit: Chinese money-suited cards' "string of cash coins" suit was misinterpreted as polo-sticks when the cards reached the Islamic world. When Mamluk cards then reached Europe, where polo was obscure and unrecognized, the polo-stick suit was renamed and re-illustrated a second time, developing into cudgels in Spain and batons in Italy.

The mechanism fires twice in series on a single artifact's route — China → Islamic world → Europe — rather than once, which distinguishes this from the single-hop renamings recorded at claim-chess-bishop-renamed-for-local-resemblance-not-elephant (chess), claim-lattice-multiplication-renamed-window-grille-in-arabic-and-italian (mathematics), and claim-kalila-wa-dimna-descends-from-borzuyas-lost-pahlavi (literature). It is the fourth domain — a material/iconographic symbol, alongside a game piece, a mathematical technique, and a literary text — showing the same underlying shape: a form crosses a cultural border and is re-anchored to something the receiving culture already recognizes rather than carried across intact. See question-transmission-chains-renamed-for-local-resemblance-pattern for the running tally against the vault's ~5-note MOC threshold.