Nicol Bolas, the Ravager // Nicol Bolas, the Arisen

The design problem here is one the brand had circled for years: how do you make Nicol Bolas feel like Nicol Bolas without simply printing an eight-mana planeswalker nobody casts? The answer is a two-stage card that asks for a different investment at each step. The front is a four-mana flyer that strips a card from each opponent's hand on entry, the kind of body that stabilizes a turn-four board and chips life while the discard bites at the opponent's plan. The transform is the part that earns the name: a sorcery-speed activation costing seven additional mana that returns him as a planeswalker entering with seven loyalty and four abilities, every one of them a haymaker. The plus draws, the minus-three deals ten to a creature or planeswalker, the minus-four reanimates from any graveyard, and the ultimate empties all but the bottom card of a player's library. What holds the design together is the separation of costs. You pay four for a real creature, then pay seven more on a later turn to convert that creature into a finisher, rather than committing the full eleven up front. The discard fires once, on the dragon's entry, so the planeswalker side is pure loyalty-driven inevitability: it did not have to start the turn on the battlefield to swing the game shut. It rewards reaching a board where the opponent is already on the back foot, then folds the game closed.