Gideon, Champion of Justice

The ultimate is the tell: exiling all other permanents reads as a board-wipe button, but the loyalty math to reach it is a feedback loop with the opponent's board, not your own resources. The +1 grows him by counting enemy creatures, which means the more pressure an opponent applies, the faster he arms; against an empty board he barely moves. That is a deliberate inversion of how planeswalkers usually accumulate value: most tick up at a fixed rate regardless of what they face, while this one scales his clock to the threat in front of him. The 0 ability is meant as the survival valve, turning him into a creature whose power and toughness equal his loyalty, granting indestructible, and preventing all damage to him that turn. But the valve leaks where it matters most. Loyalty abilities resolve only at sorcery speed, and the creature mode expires before the opponent's turn ever arrives, so he is a body on your turn and a defenseless planeswalker on theirs. He cannot block the very creatures feeding his growth, which guts the defensive fantasy the card seems to promise. The deeper friction is that none of this is proactive: he answers a developed board by eventually wiping it, but generates no cards, no tokens, no immediate tempo. Against decks that go wide he can spiral toward fifteen; against control or a slow draw he sits at four doing very little. He represents an early strand of mono-white planeswalker design, the reactive walker built to punish overextension rather than dictate the game, and that reactivity is precisely what kept him out of the decks his rate seemed to invite.