There are tons and tons of cards that force your opponents to attack. There isn't much in the way of forcing people to attack you. Portal Mage works. I suppose you could Fractured Identity any kind of pillowfort effect, Edric, or extremely efficient blocker.
What is it you're actually trying to achieve? It's possible there's another solution.
I have a feeling it plays like a worse Zur's Weirding - everyone stops and kills you so the game can progress. Except maybe not, since if people are slamming big dumb spells they probably won't leave up the mana to counter any other big, dumb spells, so maybe it just gets ignored.
Stopping people from playing threats after you drop Ice Cave means holding up the same mana as them, including colors.
Stopping people from drawing new threats after you drop Zur's Wierding means paying 2 life.
Yeah, it's symmetrical, but somebody playing Ice Cave is likely running a bunch of uncounterable spells or difficult mana costs, and the Wierding player is likely replacing their draws (Tomorrow, Abundance, Words of X, etc.), drawing too many cards to be worth paying the life for, or else simply has more life than their opponents.
having run demonic consultation myself in EDH quite a bit, i can tell you that my target has a seemingly high chance of being in the top 6 cards of my library. It also exiles a huge chunk of the library, which can mean exiling useful wincons and so on.
If you're casting Demonic Consultation, you're expecting to win the game that turn or lose the game by your next draw step at the latest. Exiling wincon cards other than the one you named are irrelevant at that point.
Or you already have Laboratory Maniac out and you named a card that isn't even in your deck. Same difference.
Which falls under "you're expecting to win the game that turn or lose the game by your next draw step at the latest."
Speaking as someone who has played Mind Sculptor in EDH in the past: It's a lot worse in multiplayer than in 1v1 where it can easily dominate games. Its reputation from 1v1 also carries over, so people tend to be overly-scared of it and will try to kill it often with even more prejudice than most planeswalkers.
It's an odd one - if I see someone casting it from their hand, I'm usually not that scared. If I see someone trying to put it on an Isochron Scepter, I'm in full panic mode....
I mean there's not much to panic about over Isochron Scepter resolving and showing off a Dramatic Reversal. Unless the Dramatic Scepter player is an idiot, the game is over on the spot, or somebody has an answer on the spot.
having run demonic consultation myself in EDH quite a bit, i can tell you that my target has a seemingly high chance of being in the top 6 cards of my library. It also exiles a huge chunk of the library, which can mean exiling useful wincons and so on.
If you're casting Demonic Consultation, you're expecting to win the game that turn or lose the game by your next draw step at the latest. Exiling wincon cards other than the one you named are irrelevant at that point.
Speaking from experience, ABUR duals are not *that* much better unless you're playing 4 or 5 colour. 3 colour decks often do just fine without them.
Functionally, they're no better than the checklands if you don't have fetchlands. But once you do? There's so much power, SO MUCH in being able to command your manabase such that you can flip between WW to BBB in the time between t2 and t3.
Certainly you can do that, but I often don't feel like you *need* to, unless you're playing a very greedy deck in terms of mana costs. I suppose I don't, but, there are folks who play punishing cards in my groups; Price of Progress, Primal Order, etc.
The Grand Abolisher to Necropotence line of play is what I was going for, there. Sometimes you DO need to, to land that. Even when nonbasic hate is aplenty, I get it, you just have to play around it or play faster than it. Or, like, this is the format with a hundred tutours, just burn one to nuke the offending hate piece.
The option to choose between Return to Dust and Cryptic Command is also very good. Duals make you flexible, and fetches that turn into duals are functionally playing extra copies of those duals, which is highly relevant in a singleton format.
In Shadowmoor/Eventide, the filter duals were largely responsible for people playing triple and quadruple color requirement cards in multiple colors without worry, like holding up mana for Cryptic and then flashing Cloudthresher when the Cryptic wasn't needed. Chaining filters together can even get you to heavy mana cost requirements in three or more colors.
There's a player in my meta with a Mistform Ultimus deck like that. A bunch of lords for different tribes, uncommonly seen anthems like Obelisk of Urd, etc.
was the deck any good/good fun to play against? i'd imagine that since it's based on having redundant effects that might have stranger effects on board, it'd always be different, and you'd never be able to expect what'd happen. Might be wrong though.
It's functionally a voltron deck, but with lords and anthems instead of auras and equipment. You can take from that what you will on whether it's "fun" to play against. It's reasonably powerful, but nowhere near cEDH. I like it mostly because it brings out cards that I rarely get to see.
Note also that your friend could use Icy Manipulator + Royal Assassin to destroy your Banewhip Punisher before the Punisher's ETB trigger resolves. In this case, you'd still be able to use Punisher's activated ability (if there's a legal target), but Nightmare wouldn't yet have a -1/-1 counter.
Wildfire doesn’t play itself. It is played by a player who is strategically deploying cards. There are situations in which it is very bad, and you do not need to play it. There are other situations in which it is very good. Here’s an example:
I have Wildfire tucked under a Spinerock Knoll. Xantcha is out, and I have Coffers/Urborg and 9 lands, while the ramp player has out 12 lands. Both other players have 8. Ramp player Strip Mine’s my Coffers. In response, I activate Xantcha 4 times and cast Wildfire. When the dust settles, the ramp player has 7 lands, I have 5, and the other players have 4. I wiped the board except for Xantcha, and now everyone is strongly considering using Xantcha’s ability to draw and dig for more mana. Again, the card is a tool in the tool box, not a “Well, I’m at 6 mana, hue hue hue, cast Wildfire. LOL!”
This is a good point about Wildfire. I actually cut it from my Windgrace "everybody sacrifice lands; it's symmetrical so it's fair" deck because I found that most of the time casting it wasn't actually beneficial to me. Cards like Tremble and even Razing Snidd just ended up more useful to me. This is a deck that runs things like Keldon Firebombers, Pox, Death Cloud, Desolation, etc.
To be frank, most of the time this is a ritual, in the same vein as Turnabout generally is. It's a combo piece with Isochron Scepter, and very occasionally it gives you surprise blockers.
A combo that gives infinite turns without any colour support needed is Prototype Portal + Ugin's Nexus + any sac out let that lets you sacrifice your copies of the Nexus.
You might want to reread Ugin's Nexus they thought of this stuff when that card was designed.
They're saying to create and sacrifice a token Nexus, so that you don't control one when you would take the extra turn.
The league I used to run instituted a 5 points per game maximum (before I took over running it) because we had a problem with some players simply sitting there farming points instead of ending the game, so they would wind up with scores in the neighborhood of 12+ while the people playing normally would usually get 3-5.
That did curtail point farms, but occasionally resulted in ties at the end of the night (we gave 1 pack to the top two each night, so if 3 people tied there was a problem).
What is it you're actually trying to achieve? It's possible there's another solution.
Stopping people from drawing new threats after you drop Zur's Wierding means paying 2 life.
Yeah, it's symmetrical, but somebody playing Ice Cave is likely running a bunch of uncounterable spells or difficult mana costs, and the Wierding player is likely replacing their draws (Tomorrow, Abundance, Words of X, etc.), drawing too many cards to be worth paying the life for, or else simply has more life than their opponents.
In Shadowmoor/Eventide, the filter duals were largely responsible for people playing triple and quadruple color requirement cards in multiple colors without worry, like holding up mana for Cryptic and then flashing Cloudthresher when the Cryptic wasn't needed. Chaining filters together can even get you to heavy mana cost requirements in three or more colors.
That did curtail point farms, but occasionally resulted in ties at the end of the night (we gave 1 pack to the top two each night, so if 3 people tied there was a problem).