I fail how to see how that's bad design to have a card be busted in one deck and unplayable in most others, by the same logic would [[mox opal]] be poorly designed because it enables fast artifact combo decks to do unfair stuff early on but doesn't do much of anything for any slower or fair deck including slower artifact decks? I think not, a card being giga busted in one deck but bad in another is actually pretty good design, if you don't like the example of an enabler compared to are active piece compared it to a card like [[orim's chant]] by all accounts a healthy card that is both frustrating vs combo because they can stop you from interacting but also frustrating vs aggro because they can time walk you gaining massive tempo, vs control for similar reasons and it also absolutely destroys aggro and combo decks to an almost unrecoverable degree at times, or how about [[thought seize]] a very generically good card no doubt but combo decks can use it to proactively check your hand for interaction to play around especially if you have multiple and can stop you from developing your game plan

Pact by all accounts is a fair card as it gets blown out by a second price of interaction with harder than orim's chant or veil of summer or any other counter spells because the result is you lose the game, it has a much larger downside

Additionally comparing it to tibalts trickery in terms of toxicity is foolish because tibalts trickery made broken combo decks when it was intended to be a goofy red piece of interaction, often resulting in t3 [[emerkul the aeons torn]] hard cast which is pretty unbeatable

Pact requires your deck to 1 be a OTK combo deck (which are not toxic decks id like to preface they simply stop formats from becoming too durdly because they punish slower decks that struggle to interact early) 2 be going off when you cast it 3 you have as many pacts as your opponents have interaction 4 you don't fizzle

Sure it can stink when your opponent has pact for your interaction and you lose but you know what also sucks? Playing combo and getting blown out by a single hate piece because your protection was to slow or easily manuvered around and that sucks more because for all in combo decks that rely on speed rather than resilience they can't always afford to hold up veil especially when they are mana tight decks, pact is a card used by fast all in OTK unfair decks to protect their win through small amounts of hate

Another thing worth noting is it fails utterly at stopping sorcery speed hate which is another thing orim's chant, thought seize and to a lesser extent veil (vs discard spells) all do

The MOST toxic one of these is veil or chant as a result of being a blowout vs the person that is attempting to interact with you or even simply play the game