Jace, the Living Guildpact

The minus-three is the whole identity here: a planeswalker that bounces a permanent the turn it lands and can return to it after building loyalty, an unconditional Man-o'-War stapled to a planeswalker that protects itself. The plus-one is loyalty maintenance dressed as filtering, milling a single card and looking at two, which builds toward the ultimate while paying back toward the next bounce. That tempo loop is the design problem this Jace was built to solve: not card advantage in the abstract, but a recurring tax on the board that a defensive deck can ride to its win condition. The ultimate is the safety valve, a full hand-and-graveyard reset that draws seven, the kind of fresh-game button control decks reach for when the bounce alone has not closed things out. What separates this iteration from the deck-stacking and brainstorming Jaces is restraint: it does almost nothing the turn it enters except answer a threat, then defends itself and grinds. The cost of all that flexibility is that the minus-three cannot target a land, so it never doubles as ramp denial or a mana-screw lock the way some bounce effects do; it is pointed squarely at the permanents that matter on the battlefield. A clean, repeatable tempo engine wearing a control finisher's clothing.