Elspeth Tirel
The whole design lives in the loyalty math. She arrives at 4 and the ultimate costs 5, so the asymmetric wipe is out of reach the turn she lands; one plus-two takes her to 6, and from there the reset is online the following turn. That single up-tick is what you have to pay before the detonation is available, which makes the plus ability load-bearing rather than incidental. While you wait, the minus-two prints three Soldiers to soak attacks and the plus banks life equal to your creature count, so the climb defends itself. The payoff destroys all other permanents except lands and tokens, leaving the army she manufactured standing while the opponent's nontoken threats are gone. It is a lopsided sweeper disguised as a planeswalker ultimate, and crucially one you actually expect to fire.
That is what separates her from most of the early planeswalker minus-fives, which were win-more flourishes you rarely lived to reach. Hers functions as a genuine control finisher: it dismantles a stalled battlefield rather than punctuating a game already decided. She asks for almost no deck support (no attackers beyond the tokens she makes, no synergy package), only the time to tick once and the discipline to survive the turn in between. The gap between her starting loyalty and the cost of the reset is small enough to plan around but large enough that the opponent gets a window to kill her first. You earn the wipe, or you do not get it at all.
