Dovin Baan
A planeswalker built around denial rather than presence, which is exactly why he never quite landed where the splashier Azorius walkers did. His +1 is a soft Pacifism on a stick: it shrinks an attacker by three power and shuts off activated abilities, but only until your next turn, so it patches one combat step instead of removing a threat. The -1 is the card every defensive walker wants, a Sphinx's Revelation in miniature that gains two life and refills your hand. And the ultimate is the tell: an emblem that caps opponents at two untapped permanents per turn is a strangling tax that, in a slower mirror, ends the game on its own. The trouble is that the two halves pull in opposite directions. Reaching a seven-loyalty payoff means leaning on the +1 to climb, but the +1 only stalls a single attacker for a turn and does little to protect his own loyalty against a real clock. The -1 you actually want to cast spends loyalty in the wrong direction, pushing the emblem further out of reach every time you draw a card. He reads as a control finisher who arrives too small to control and too passive to finish: the recurring tension in Azorius planeswalker design, a card that wants you to already be winning before it does any work. Flavorfully apt for a character defined by perfectionist obstruction, less so as a card you reliably want to cast.
