I believe there's a spectrum between "encouraging someone to attack someone else" and "discouraging someone from attacking me" and different people respond to different stimuli.

Some people are highly motivated by reward. Those people love getting bonuses and will respond well to cards that give them, like agitator ant, noble heritage, wound reflection, etc. These people are our friends and will usually take every advantage we give them.

Some people are highly loss adverse. They hate punishments, and will avoid it until they have to. They respond to rattlesnakes, No Mercy, and even Ghostly Prison because it stops their development. These people are also our friends as long as we have enough effects to keep them wary of us. And if they're already not attacking, they may as well take some counters, right?

Some people don't care about either. Sometimes they hate the idea of being manipulated and will do anything to spite you, even if it's irrational. These people are not your friends, and that's where pillowfort cards really shine. They can't attack you with everything most of the time, and if they do, it's later in the game when they don't need to develop. But even then, it drains their ability to use combat tricks or counterspells for when you're reacting to them. Even if it only stalls them a few turns as they're building up, you've gotten more draws, more mana, more +1/+1 counters, etc.

I run these pillowfort cards specifically because they encourage people to build up one large threat to break through, which motivates them to take counters, and makes it easier to aikido as well.

And for the flying/first strike/lifelink creatures, they synergize very well with all the scaling buffs, especially Crescendo of War (assuming I keep it in the list this time). Pillowfort plus first striking lifelinkers makes it almost impossible to sneak in chip damage, and the lifelink is great for wars of attrition. It's good against things like extort or group slug, while also making it awkward for the token player to attack you, because they have to do enough damage to ignore your 10/10 lifelinker. Basically, they set it up so that people have to commit hard to taking you down, and if they do, you're well equipped to answer them.

king-saproling I've looked at a lot of those cards before but some of them are new! I think the shell is highly flexible and can support most things, but I am curious behind the reasoning on trimming most of the pillowfort and a handful of the rattlesnake cards.

Ill-Tempered Loner  ^Flip is great but frankly I can't be bothered to track Day/Night when I'm playing in paper.

Bloodthirsty Blade is solid and I have playtested it before, but my experience was that people were generally annoyed to see it, and because it was so cheap, there was no reason for me to not be using it constantly.

Truefire Captain was in there for a long time, but I needed space and it's one of my least favorite versions of the effect. 4 cmc, difficult casting cost, mediocre blocker, encourages aggression. So I trimmed it out for the ones I like slightly more, though I could be persuaded to readd the 3ish versions of the card that I don't run.

Ancient Gold Dragon would definitely be a powerhouse, but it's not really on theme for the deck. It's highly synergistic with Ganax, but Ganax is just in the deck because he's a red commander with Choose a Background and has flying. Gold Dragon is aggressive and highly threatening, which goes against the design goal for the list.

Death Kiss is fun, but I haven't tested it yet. Only concerns are the CMC and tracking the combat math.

For Life of the Party, I have some friends who love this card, but they play it in more of a blink deck where it can really shine. I don't know if I have enough support for it, but maybe I should give it a shot and see what happens.

Crown of Doom is super on-theme, but I've always found it to be relatively low-impact. +2 attack isn't a huge buff, and there's no guarantee it's on the person you need to be attacking.

Curse of the stalked Prey hits on similar issues with Crown of Doom, but I personally don't want to be using curses in the first place. You never know who they need to be on until much later on in the game. Like, imagine you curse someone and it turns out that player 3 is the real threat this game. You're rewarding people for attacking the wrong person, and encouraging them to avoid the real threat.

Skyboon Evangelist is fascinating; it reminds me of Frontier Warmonger. The reason I trimmed Warmonger was just that people never took advantage of the effect, it was just something I kept having to remind them of. I'm definitely going to have to think about this card though; I haven't seen it before.

Thanks for the feedback!