*waves* Please excuse me for butting in! It just occurred to me...maybe it wasn't an anvil? And perhaps I'm giving the writers too much credit, but maybe what we're supposed to get from Luci's parallel, and the taunting that Patrick the Immortal Poker Witch did about Sam's little brother complex (which turned out to be sooo mistaken), is that these taunts don't work on Sam any more.

Sam can't be manipulated that way anymore, not while he's got his Dean beside him. The bad guys don't realize that yet, but they're working with an outmoded paradigm.

Maybe that's the message we were supposed to get?