Garruk Relentless // Garruk, the Veil-Cursed

The flip mechanic here isn't cosmetic; it's the design's spine. Most planeswalkers manage their own loyalty as a resource you spend down deliberately, but this one transforms automatically the moment he drops to two or fewer counters, which turns the front face's instability into a feature. Front Garruk has no loyalty cost to pay at all: both abilities are free. He plays as a grindy attrition piece, either shooting a creature and taking its power back as damage (a fight clause hung on a planeswalker, with all the self-inflicted risk that implies) or fielding 2/2 Wolves to hold the ground. That first ability is the trigger a player reaches for on purpose: aim the fight at a beefy enough creature and the return damage knocks him under the threshold, flipping him to the Veil-Cursed by choice rather than by combat. Either way the back face opens a toolbox: deathtouch token generation, a sacrifice-to-tutor engine that converts dying creatures into the exact answer you need, and an overrun that scales off your graveyard. That last ability is the tell. The whole card pays off a strategy that spends its own creatures as fuel, and the ultimate counts the bodies already lost. Garruk's curse, the narrative throughline of his arc across this plane and the planes after it, is rendered mechanically as a walker who gets meaner the more he's been beaten down. Few transform cards make the flip read like a consequence rather than a coin flip.