Chandra Ablaze

The plus ability is a self-imposed tax dressed as a payoff: to fire off four damage to any target, you have to feed it a red card from your hand, which means this Chandra wants a deck stuffed with red spells precisely so her cheapest loyalty move stays live. That tension runs through the whole kit. The minus two is the loud one, a symmetrical wheel that empties both hands and refills three: a red planeswalker handing card advantage to spellslinger and reanimator decks alike, with no guarantee the symmetry breaks in your favor. The ultimate pays off the discard theme directly, casting a graveyard's worth of red instants and sorceries for free, including everything the wheel pitched on the way up. The design ambition here is coherent: a planeswalker built entirely around moving red cards from hand to graveyard and then cashing the graveyard in. The trouble is the rate. Six mana for a five-loyalty walker whose plus does nothing without the right card in hand, and whose flagship ability draws three cards for your opponents too, asks for a deck constructed around her in a way that most red decks of any era have been unwilling to bend toward. She remains one of the more conceptually unified members of her own character's long line of printings, even as the math never quite caught up to the idea.