Disrupt Decorum

Goad exists to solve multiplayer's oldest structural problem: a mass-attack effect that a table can trust, because it never points at the caster. Where older "everyone must attack" cards like Grand Melee left the aggressor exposed to their own handiwork, this one carves out the one player who cast it. The whole board turns into a weapon, and it turns away from you. That asymmetry is the entire pitch. For four mana at sorcery speed, you are not gaining a permanent or a card; you are renting one combat step's worth of everyone else's creatures and aiming them at the two or three opponents to your left and right. It is a political instrument first and a tempo play second: a stalled multiplayer board where nobody wants to swing first is exactly the state this dissolves, forcing the durdling armies into each other while you sit outside the crossfire until your next turn. The design is honest about its narrowness. Its redirection clause does nothing in one-on-one games (no third party to redirect toward), and its value is entirely a function of how much power the rest of the table has committed to the ground. Cast it into an empty board and you have spent four mana on a shrug; cast it into three built-out armies and you have started a war you are not obligated to fight.