Carth the Lion

The superfriends payoff that finally treated dead planeswalkers as fuel rather than failure. Before this, a planeswalker's death was pure tempo loss: you spent four or five mana, the board answered it, and you banked a ticked-up loyalty ability's worth of value at best. Carth reframes that exchange by rewarding the death itself, digging seven deep for the next walker to replace the one that just fell. The static ability is the quieter innovation, and the one that changes how a deck plays out: every loyalty ability you activate gets a permanent bump upward. Small increments compound fast. Ultimates that read as a distant three-turn plan arrive a turn early; a walker that would otherwise tick to nothing holds its ground; the archetype shifts from playing defense around fragile permanents to snowballing them faster than an opponent can answer. The 3/5 body is deliberately unglamorous, a wall that stalls the aggressive starts a planeswalker pile fears most while the engine assembles behind it. What makes Carth load-bearing rather than cute is that it addresses both halves of the planeswalker problem at once: it refills the hand when they die and accelerates them when they live. That is the design tension the card resolves, and it is why a color pair not historically associated with planeswalkers suddenly had a reason to run a dozen of them.