Instigator

Goading wasn't a keyword yet when this Spellshaper showed up, but the effect was already on the table: force a player's creatures to attack this turn, then punish them for swinging into a board they'd rather have held back. The activation is steep for what it does (the ability cost, plus the tap and a discarded card), and the body offering it is fragile enough that the engine usually only fires once or twice before it dies. What sets it apart from a simple combat-forcing spell is timing: because Spellshaper abilities resolve at instant speed, you can hold the activation up and yank an opponent's creatures into an attack only after they've already chosen to keep mana open or committed to a plan, then meet the forced swing with open removal or a combat trick. The card-as-fuel cost ties it to the Mercadian Masques discard theme, where the graveyard had somewhere worth feeding. It reads now as an early, expensive sketch of an idea Wizards kept circling and eventually keyworded outright; the difference is that here the compulsion sweeps all of a player's creatures at once rather than marking a single attacker, which makes it a tool for breaking a wall-up stall or stripping a defender of its blockers wholesale rather than a one-creature political nudge.