Nicol Bolas, Dragon-God

The Grixis identity, packed into five colored pips across three colors, is the tax the design collects, and it buys something no other Bolas printing has attempted: a planeswalker that mirrors the loyalty abilities of every other walker on the board. That static line is the whole design conceit. It turns any planeswalker mirror into a liability, since an opponent's own Bolas or Teferi hands this one their abilities too, and it means the card scales with the board state rather than sitting on a fixed toolkit. The three printed abilities are already brutal in isolation: a plus that draws and strips a card from each opponent, a minus-three that answers the biggest threat on either side of the table, and an ultimate that ends the game for anyone caught without a legendary creature or planeswalker to hide behind. The mimicry stacks on top of all of it. What marks this as a late-era take on the villain is the reversal of his usual posture: earlier Bolas cards were self-sufficient engines you built around, while this one is parasitic, feeding on the very planeswalkers it shares a battlefield with. The ultimate's escape clause is telling too, sparing opponents who hold a legendary body or a walker of their own, which pushes the card toward grinding out attrition rather than a clean kill button. It is less a finisher than a black hole: everything on the board bends toward it, including the tools your opponents brought to stop it.