Dakkon, Shadow Slayer

Loyalty scaling off your land count is the whole gamble: enter behind on lands and you have a fragile three-mana walker whose exile ability cannot even fire yet; enter with six or seven lands and you have dropped a planeswalker that immediately threatens a minus-three the turn it lands, then again if you can keep it fed. That variable-entry design is the tension the card is built around, and it rewards the deck that plays out its mana rather than hoarding cards. The plus-one is pure attrition maintenance: surveil to fill the graveyard and select your next draw while padding loyalty, which quietly sets up the ultimate. It buys no board presence and does nothing to keep attackers off Dakkon; the loyalty gain is the only thing standing between him and a swing. Where the card gets genuinely strange is that minus-six, an artifact-cheating clause on an Esper walker. It puts an artifact from hand or graveyard straight onto the battlefield, turning Dakkon from a control finisher into a build-around: the loyalty math means a dedicated shell can realistically reach the ultimate, and the surveil is there to bin the payoff before you pull it back. The Legends-era swordbearer gets a body-less reinterpretation here, trading equipment-and-power flavor for a control-and-artifacts engine, but the through-line holds: Dakkon has always been about lands feeding power, and this version literalizes it, printing your land count directly as the resource that decides whether the walker is a speed bump or a wincon.