Chandra, Fire Artisan

Loyalty as a resource pointed the wrong way. Almost every planeswalker treats its loyalty counters as pure defense, a life total that ticks down until the walker dies; here that same erosion is a weapon. The triggered ability turns any loss of counters into direct damage to an opponent or their planeswalker, which quietly rewrites how you value her getting attacked. A creature that would normally chip her down is instead firing her damage for you, and the ultimate stops being a finish-line reward and becomes an option you might want to reach the hard way, since the seven counters spent on the minus feed straight back into the trigger. The plus does the impulsive-draw work red has leaned into for years, exiling the top card to play this turn, which fits her clock: you are not building loyalty toward safety, you are stockpiling it as ammunition. The tension is that the two halves want opposite things. The plus wants to accumulate; the trigger wants that accumulation spent, ideally all at once. That makes her unusually happy to die on her own terms, and unusually punishing to remove with anything that strips counters rather than destroying the permanent outright: burn her down and you take the damage yourself. It is a design that takes the fragility every planeswalker shares and reframes it as the payoff.