Liliana, Heretical Healer // Liliana, Defiant Necromancer
The transform trigger is the whole design: a lifelink body that flips the moment any other nontoken creature you control dies, turning ordinary combat losses and sacrifice fodder into the mechanism that unlocks the planeswalker. That single condition reframes what looks like a modest 2/3 into a two-part payoff, and the flip even leaves a 2/2 Zombie behind, so the death that triggers it rarely feels like a loss. As a planeswalker, she reads like a compact statement of black's graveyard identity: the plus is symmetric hand attrition of the kind black has run since Mind Rot, but the minus is where she earns her keep, a scaling reanimation that pulls a nonlegendary creature back for exactly its mana value in loyalty spent. The X-cost minus rewards you for stocking a graveyard with bodies across the curve rather than a single haymaker, and the ultimate closes the loop by making every creature death, yours or theirs, a recruitment. This is one of the tighter walker designs of its era for how completely the two faces cohere: the front asks you to trade creatures, the back rewards you for having done so, and the loyalty abilities all orbit the same graveyard the flip condition helped fill. Reanimation, discard, and a body that flips itself off your own aristocratic instincts, packaged into a single card that behaves like a self-contained black midrange engine.
